\5 



aji i^KS'l-JHyfi 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 



BY 



Rev. a. L. PERRY, D.D., LL.D., 

Pbofessor op History and Political Economy in Williams College, 

"WiLLIAMSTOWN, MASS. 



SECOND EDITION 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1896 



SCOTCII-IPtlSII IN NEW ENGLAND. 



BY 



Rev. a. L. perry, D.D., LL.D., 

Professor op History and Political Economy in Williams College, 

WlLLIAMSTOWN, MASS. 



SECOND EDITION 



NEW YOKK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1896 



?l^^ 

\^^^ 



Copyright, 1891, 
By Arthur Latham Perry. 



GIFT 

■««. woooRow wmsoi» 

"OV. 25, 1939 



Typography by J. S. Gushing & Co., Boston. 
Presswork by Berwick & Smith, Boston. 



Eead before the Scotch-Irish Society of America, at 

Pittsburgh, Penn., May 29, 1890; and here 

reprinted with their consent. 



SCOTCH-IEISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 



Mr. Pkesident and Brethren of the Society — 

The Scotch-Irish did not enter New England unheralded. Early 
m the spring of 1718 Rev. Mr. Boyd was dispatched from Ulster to 
Boston as an agent of some hundreds of those people who expressed 
a strong desire to remove to New England, should suitable encour- 
agement be afforded them. His mission was to Governor Shute, of 
Massachusetts, then in the third year of his administration of that 
colony, an old soldier of King William, a Lieutenant-Colonel under 
Marlborough in the wars of Queen Anne, and wounded in one of 
the great battles in Flanders. Mr. Boyd was empowered to make 
all necessary arrangements with the civil authorities for the recep- 
tion of those whom he represented, in case his report of the state of 
things here should prove to be favorable. 

As an assurance to the governor of the good faith and earnest 
resolve of those who sent him, Mr. Boyd brought an engrossed 
parchment twenty-eight inches square, containing the following 
memorial to his excellency, and the autograph names of the heads 
of the families proposing to emigrate : " We Avhose names are 
underwritten, Inhabitants of ye North of Ireland, Doe in our own 
names, and in the names of many others, our Neighbors, Gentlemen, 
Ministers, Farmers, and Tradesmen, Commissionate and appoint our 
trusty and well beloved friend, the Reverend Mr. William Boyd, of 
Macasky, to His Excellency, the Right Honorable Collonel Sanuiel 
Suitte, Governour of New England, and to assure His Excellency of 
our sincere and hearty Inclination to Transport ourselves to that 
very excellent and renowned Plantation upon our obtaining from 
His Excellency suitable incouragement. And further to act and 
Doe in our Names as his prudence shall direct. Given under our 
hands this 26th day of March, Anno Dom. 1718." 

To this brief but explicit memorial, three hundred and nineteen 
names were appended, all but thirteen of them in fair and vigorous 



6 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

autograph. Thirteen only, or four per cent of the whole, made their 
"mark" upon the parchment. It may well be questioned, whether 
in any other part of the United Kingdom at that time, one hundred 
and seventy-tAvo years ago, in England or Wales, or Scotland or 
Ireland, so large a proportion as ninety-six per cent of promiscuous 
householders in the common walks of life could have written their 
own names. And it was proven in the sequel, that those who could 
write, as well as those who could not, were also able upon occasion 
to make their "markJ' 

I have lately scrutinized with critical care this ancient parchment 
stamped by the hands of our ancestors, now in the custody of the 
Historical Society of New Hampshire, and was led into a line of 
reflections which I will not now repeat, as to its own vicissitudes in 
the seven quarter-centuries of its existence, and as to the personal 
vicissitudes and motives, and heart-swellings and hazards, and cold 
and hunger and nakedness, as well as the hard-earned success and 
the sense of triumph, and the immortal vestigia of the men who 
lovingly rolled and unrolled this costly parchment on the banks of 
the Foyle and the Bann Water ! Tattered are its edges now, 
shrunken by time and exposure its original dimensions, illegible 
already some of the names even under the fortifying power of 
modern lenses, but precious in the eyes of New England, nay, 
precious in the eyes of Scotch-Irishmen everywhere, is this vener- 
able muniment of intelligence and of courageous purpose looking 
down upon us from the time of the first English George. 

It is enough for our present purpose to know that Governor 
Shute gave such general encouragement and promise of welcome 
through Mr. Boyd to his constituents that the latter were content 
with the return-word received from their messenger, and set about 
with alacrity the preparations for their embarkation. Nothing 
definite was settled between the governor and the minister, not 
even the locality of a future residence for the newcomers ; but it is 
clear in general, that the governor's eye was upon the district of 
Maine, then and for a century afterward, a part of Massachusetts. 
Eive years before Boyd's visit to Boston, had been concluded the 
European treaty of Utrecht, and, as between England and France, it 
had therein been agreed that all of Nova Scotia or Acadia, "accord- 
ing to its ancient boundaries," should remain to England. But what 
were the ancient boundaries of Acadia ? Did it include all that is 
now New Brunswick ? Or had France still a large territory on the 
Atlantic between Acadia and ]\Iaine ? This was a vital question, 
wholly inisolved by the treaty. The motive of Massachusetts in 



- SCOTCH-UIISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 7 

Avelcoming the Scotch-Irish into her jurisdiction was to plant them 
on the frontiers of Maine as a living bulwark against the restless and 
enterprising French of the north, and their still more restless savage 
allies ; the motive of the Ulstermen in coming to America was to 
establish homes of their own in fee simple, taxable only to support 
their own form of worship and their strictly local needs — to escape, 
in short, the land lease and the church tithe; the bottom aims, accord- 
ingly, of both parties to the negotiation ran parallel with each other, 
and there was in consequence a swift agreement in the present, and 
in the long sequel a large realization of the purposes of both. 

August 4, 1718, five small ships came to anchor near the little 
wharf at the foot of State Street in Boston, then a town of perhaps 
twelve thousand people. On board these ships were about one 
hundred and twenty families of Scotch-Irish. They reckoned them- 
selves in families. It is certain that the number of persons in the 
average family so reckoned was, according to our modern notions, 
very large. There may have been, there probably was, at least 
seven hundred and fifty passengers on board. Cluttered in those 
separate ships, not knowing exactly whither to turn, having as a 
whole no recognized leader on board, no Castle Garden to afford 
a preliminary shelter, no organized Commissioners of Immigration 
to lend them a hand, the most of them extremely poor — the imag- 
ination would fain, but may not picture the confusions and per- 
plexities, the stout hearts of some and the heart-aches of others, the 
reckless joy of children, and the tottering steps of old men and 
women. One patriarch, John Young — I know his posterity well — 
was ninety-five years old. And there were babies in arms, a plenty 
of them ! 

Besides Mr. Boyd, who had stayed the summer in Boston, where 
he found already settled a few scattered and peeled of his own race 
and faith, there were three Presbyterian ministers on board, — Mr, 
McGregor, of blessed memory, Mr. Cornwell, and Mr. Holmes. 
Those best off of all the passengers — the McKeens, the Cargills, 
the Nesmiths, the Cochrans, the Dinsmores, the Mooars, and some 
other families — were natives of Scotland, whose heads had passed 
over into Ulster during the short reign of James II. These were 
Covenanters. They had lived together in the valley of the Bann 
Water for about thirty years, in or near the towns of Coleraine and 
Ballymoney and Kilrea. Their pastor was James McGregor. They 
wished to settle together in the new land of promise. They or their 
fathers and neighbors had felt the edge of the sword of Graham of 
Claverhouse in Argyleshire ; they wished to enjoy together in peace 



8 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

in some sequestered spot the sweet ministrations of the Gospel 
according to their own sense of its rule and order, and, being better 
able than the rest to wait and choose out for themselves, we shall 
follow their fortunes a little farther on. 

Others of the company were the descendants of those who par- 
ticipated in the original " Colonization of Ulster," which dates from 
1610 ; and of those who, three years later, formed the first Presbytery 
in Ireland, the "Presbytery of Antrim." Others still were the 
progeny of those Scotchmen and Englishmien, whom Cromwell trans- 
planted at the middle of the century to take the places of those 
wasted by his own pitiless sword — " the sword of the Lord and of 
Gideon ! " And a few families of native Irish also mingled in the 
throngs around the wharf, doubtless drawn by sympathy and attach- 
ment to take the risk of the New with their neighbors whom they 
had found trustworthy and hospitable in the Old. I only know for 
certain that the numerous Young family, consisting of four genera- 
tions, and the wife of Joshua Gray, of whom we shall hear more 
pretty soon, were Celtic Irish. 

If now we except some individuals and families of this great 
company, who found pretty soon a transient or permanent home in 
Boston in connection with their countrymen already settled there 
in an isolated way, and who a few years afterward formed a Presby- 
terian Church in Long Lane (later Federal Street), under Rev. John 
Moorehead of saintly but eccentric memory, which church turned 
Congregational in 1786, and afterward, under the famous Dr. 
Channing, became the bridge to Unitarianism ; and if we except 
also, perhaps, as many families who went up that autumn to An- 
dover, then a new town whose development they influenced both 
socially and theologically, and a considerable number more who went 
up temporarily to await events, to the towns along the Merrimac, as 
Dracut and Haverhill, all the rest of the migration became located 
in the course of six months in three main centers, to which we must 
now attend in order, and from which these peculiar people diffused 
themselves little by little into every corner of New England. 

1. Worcester. Nowadays we in Massachusetts call Worcester 
"the heart of the Commonwealth." It is a shallow bowl of beauti- 
ful country. The fall of 1718 marked the fifth year of its permanent 
settlement. There were about fifty log-houses and two hundred 
souls Avithin the circle. These were all English and Puritans, and 
from the towns immediately to the eastward. P>ut the Indians 
were hostile. Two previous settlements on the spot had been 
abandoned from this cause, — the first in King Philip's War in the 



SCOTCH-IKISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 9 

year 1675, the second iu Queen Anne's War in 1709. Now the colony 
was determined to hold the ground. At least five garrison-houses, 
one a regular block fort, stood within the bowl. Accordingly, Gov- 
ernor Shiite looked favorably upon the proposition, that a part of 
the Scotch-Irish, now in one sense on his hands, should go direct to 
Worcester, to find a much-needed home for themselves, to reinforce 
the fifty families already on the ground, and to take their chances 
in helping to defend the menaced western frontier, fifty miles from 
Boston. 

We do not know exactly how many went to Worcester. We 
may fairly infer that at least fifty families — large families — went 
straight from Boston to Worcester that autumn, and that the popu- 
lation of the place was thus more than doubled at one stroke. I 
entertain the opinion, gathered from scattered and uncertain data, 
that it was the poorer, the more illiterate, the more helpless, part 
of the five shi^>loads who were conducted to Worcester. I have 
hanging in my study, handsomely framed, the original deed by 
which my immediate maternal ancestor, Matthew Gray, conveyed to 
his son, of the same name, in 1735, his farm in Worcester of fifty- 
five acres, still called there the "Gray Farm," to which deed are 
appended not the autographs but the " marks " of MattheAV and 
Jean, his wife. Neither Matthew nor Jean could write. The deed 
is witnessed, however, by " William Gray, Jr.," who writes a fair 
hand; but "Ealanor Gray," who witnesses with him, makes her 
" mark." Three marks to one manual is a bad proportion, but you 
will allow me to premise that the Grays, though illiterate, were 
long-headed. 

There is much evidence that the poor Scotch-Irish were welcomed 
in Worcester at first. They were needed there, both for civil and 
military reasons. Jonas Rice, the first permanent settler of Wor- 
cester, who had been a planter during the second settlement broken 
up by the Indians, returned to his farm to stay, October 21, 1713, 
and remained with his family alone in the forest till the spring of 
1715. Adonijah, his son, was the first child born in Worcester, 
November 7, 1714. The cool courage, good sense, and strict integ- 
rity of Jonas Eice made him the first great leader in the toAvn 
where great leaders have never been wanting since. He was just 
the man to appreciate the stout hearts of his new-come, not yet 
well-understood, neighbors. No town organization had as yet been 
made when, in 1722, Lovell's Indian War broke out, and two Scotch- 
Irishmen, John Gray and Robert Crawford, were posted alone as 
scouts on Leicester Hill to the westward, doubtless at Rice's in- 



10 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

stance. In September of the same year a township organization 
was first effected, and Jolm Gray, Avith Jonas Eice, were two of the 
first selectmen ; William Gray was chosen one of the two fence- 
viewers, and Robert Peebles one of the two hog-reeves. At the first 
annual town meeting, the next year, new names of the strangers 
appear on the list of town officers ; for example, James Hamil- 
ton as surveyor, and Andrew Farren as fence-viewer, though John 
Gray dropped this year from selectman to sealer of leather ; but at 
the second annual March meeting, 1724, John Gray goes back to 
his earlier post as selectman ; James McClellan, great-great-great- 
grandfather to the late general-in-chief, becomes a constable ; Robert 
Lethridge, a surveyor of highways ; William Gray and Robert Pee- 
bles, fence-viewers ; John Battay, tithingman ; and Matthew Gray, 
my own great-great-grandfather, both sealer of leather and hog-reeve. 

The most interesting of the purely Irish families, who came Avith 
the Scotch to Worcester, with whom they had contracted relation- 
ship during their long residence in Ulster, or become attached by 
community of sentiment and suffering, was the Young family, four 
generations together. They brought the potato to Worcester, and 
it was first planted there in several fields in the spring of 1719. 
The tradition is still lively in Scotch-Irish families (I listened to it 
eagerly in my boyhood) that some of their English neighbors, after 
enjoying the hospitality of one of the Irish families, were presented 
each, on their departure, with a few tubers for planting, and the 
recipients, unwilling to give offense by refusing, accepted the gift ; 
but suspecting the poisonous quality, carried them only to the next 
swamp and chucked them into the water. The same spring a few 
potatoes were given for seed to a Mr. Walker, of Andover, Mass., 
by an Irish family who had wintered with him, previous to their 
departure for Londonderry to the northward. The potatoes were 
accordingly planted, came up and flourished well, blossomed and 
produced halls, which the family supposed were the fruit to be eaten. 
They cooked the balls in various ways, but could not make them 
palatable, and pronounced them unfit for food. The next spring, 
Avhile plowing the garden, the plow passed through where the 
potatoes had grown, and turned out some of great size, by which 
means they discovered their mistake. This is the reason Avhy this 
noAv indispensable esculent is still called in Ncav England certainly, 
and perhaps elscAvhere, the "Irish potato." 

John Young Avas perhaps the oldest immigrant Avho ever came to 
this country to live and die. If the inscription on his tombstone is 
to be trusted, Avhich the American Aiiti(iuarian Society, of Worcester, 



SCOTCH-iniSH IN NEW ENGLAND. 11 

copied and published many years ago, lie was ninety-five years old 
when he landed at Boston. He lived in Worcester twelve years, 
died in 1730, was buried in the old yard on the common. HTs son, 
David Young, an old man when he came, died at ninety-four years, 
and was buried in the same place. His son, William Young, a 
stone-cutter by trade, erected over their graves a common double 
headstone, with the following inscriptions in parallel columns, united 
at the bottom by the rude yet precious rhyming lines : — 

"Here lies interred the icinaiiis ol Here lies interred the remains of 

John Young, who was born in David Young, who was born in 

the isle of Bert, near London- the parish of Tahbeyn, county of 

derry, in the Kingdom of Ireland. Donegal, and Kingdom of Ireland. 

He departed this life, June He departed this life, December 

30, 1730, aged 107 years. 26, aged 94 years. 

The aged son, and Uie more aged father 
Beneath (these) stones their mould' ring bones 
Here rest together." 

Moses Young, probably the son of this e^itaphist, William Young, 
was a lad of some six years at the time of the emigration, and 
became the ancestor of numerous families of that name in Western 
Massachusetts, and particularly in Williamstown, the town of my 
residence, where there are no less than five Young families at 
present, living in one neighborhood, the same they have occupied as 
farmers for a century and a quarter. These families and individuals 
have never exhibited the main traits of their Scotch-Irish com- 
panions and their descendants. The} have been less " canny " and 
enterprising. Kace blood tells from generation to generation. They 
have been, perhaps, more inclined to intoxicants than the others; 
although, if the truth must be told, the whole tribe in New England, 
as a rule, and in the earlier times, have drunk more than their fair 
share of the liquor. Only now and then one of the Youngs has tried 
professional and official life. John Young, born in Worcester, June 
2, 1739, studied medicine with the first and famous Dr. Green, of 
Worcester. He practiced a little while in Pelham, and then moved 
to Peterborough, N.H., about 17G4. Both of these were Scotch- 
Irish towns, and Dr. Young's migrations illustrate the usage, well- 
nigh universal in the last century, of families and individuals 
moving from town to town within the Presbyterian circuit. Young 
was always very poor, and became very intemperate. The common 
custom of " treating " the doctor and minister at each professional, 
and even friendly call, wrought mischief to multitudes of both 
orders ; and the later and the last necessities of poor John Young, 



12 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

who died February 27, 1807, were considerately ministered unto by 
the town of Peterborough. 

When "Lovell's War" was over, and before the "Old French 
War " began, and when the two sets of population in Worcester 
settled down to a better neighborhood acquaintance, the inevitable 
antipathies waked up as between Englishmen and Scotchmen, as 
between Presbyterians and Puritans. Certain traits and habits of 
our folks, to be specified later as common to them in all ISTew England, 
intensified the feeling of repugnance felt toward them in Worcester. 
They were commonly called "Irish." Even a formal act of the 
General Court of Massachusetts denominated them "poor Irish 
people " ; and a little later the General Court of New Hampshire 
styled the Londonderry section of them " a company of Irish at 
Nutfield." This designation they all naturally enough resented. 
"We are surprised," writes Kev. James McGregor, the pastor of 
Londonderry, in a letter to Governor Shute, bearing date in 1720, 
"to hear ourselves termed Irish people, when we so frequently 
ventured our all for the British crown and liberties against the 
Irish papists, and gave all tests of our loyalty which the govern- 
ment of Ireland required, and are always ready to do the same when 
required." 

In Worcester there were at least two, Abraham Blair and Wil- 
liam Caldwell, and in Londonderry several more, including Rev. 
Matthew Clark, of the survivors of the heroic defense of the Ulster 
Londonderry in 1689 ; and these men and their heirs were made 
free of taxation throughout the British provinces by Act of Parlia- 
ment, and occupied what were called " exempt farms " in 'New Eng- 
land until the American Revolution, so immensely important to the 
establishment of their throne did William and Mary hold the ser- 
vices of the Protestant settlers and defenders of Ulster against the 
last and the worst of the Stuarts. Now, for these very men and 
their companions in exile to be stigmatized as " Irish," in the sense 
in which that term was then held in reproach, was a bitter pill to 
our fathers ; and this, and other prejudices more or less Avell-founded, 
only yielded, in the course of time, to the influence of their simple 
virtues and sterling worth. 

The tenure by which these people held their lands in Worcester 
seems at first to have been the same as that of their English neigh- 
bors, who came earlier; namely, by direct grant of the General 
Court of Massachusetts : at any rate, there is a very early record 
that lots were so granted to John Gray and Andrew McFarland, 
two of their leaders ; and the lots so granted earlier to members oi: 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 13 

the Committee of Settlement, and to others not actual settlers, were 
soon in the market at a very cheap price, and it is known that some 
of the families bought these lots at second hand, because the deeds 
are on record, and I have seen them ; it was not, accordingly, at this 
point, of lands or anything connected with them, that the jealousy 
and bitterness between the two strains of blood began, but rather 
at the point of differences of language and personal habits, and 
especially of church beliefs and ceremonial. The English had put 
up a rude log meeting-house the year before the Scotch-Irish came, 
and the year after a more commodious structure was erected on the 
site of the " Old South Church " (but quite recently removed) ; the 
Ulster Presbyterians, from the very first, liked to have worship by 
themselves, and in their own way, whenever and wherever they 
could ; it is known that they held service, sometimes in summer, in 
the open air, and for a considerable period, by vote of the town, 
they occupied for preaching purposes one of the old garrison houses, 
commonly called the " Old Fort." Here having formed a religious 
society, they enjoyed for a time the ministrations of Rev. Edward 
Eitzgerald and Eev. William Johnston; still, they did not aban- 
don the Puritan Church on the Common, and were taxed, of course, 
for its support. This taxation made friction, for they were poor 
and could not support their own minister besides contributing to 
the support of the other ; and Mr. Eitzgerald, being unable to procure 
proper maintenance, removed from the town. The numbers of Pres- 
byterian communicants were nearly equal to those of the Congrega- 
tional Church, and the latter had proposed a union Avith the former ; 
and Mr. Fitzgerald had once been invited to occupy the pulpit, 
vacated by the dismissal of Rev. Mr. Gardner in 1722, for a single 
Sabbath when no candidate could be procured, but the request was 
not repeated, and no inducement was held out to him to remain. 

In 1725 the English settled a new minister in the person of Rev. 
Isaac Burr, and the tacit understanding if not the express agreement 
was that if the Presbyterians would aid morally and pecuniarily in 
his support, they should be permitted to place in the pulpit occasion- 
ally teachers of their own denomination ; and so the Scotch people 
united with the other inhabitants. After some time, finding that 
their expectations were not being realized in this regard, and were 
not likely to be, the Scotch withdrew from the Church on the 
Common, and installed the Rev. William Johnston to be their min- 
ister. Feelings were deepening, difficulties in the way of union 
were multiplying, and the Scotch had no suitable place of worship 
of their own. When, in 1733, the Church on the Common was 



14 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

repaired and somewhat adorned, and a committee of seven (all Eng- 
lish) being appointed ''to seat ye meeting-house pursuant to instruc- 
tions," it cannot be denied that the olive-branch was held out to the 
party of the second part by assigning them in general very good 
seats, according to the standard of the time ; for example : " In ye 
fore section of ye body" (with five English families), John Gray; 
"In ye second section of ye body" (with three English), William 
Gray, James Hamilton, Andrew McEarland, John Clark, Kobert 
Peebles ; " In ye third section of ye body " (all Scotch), Matthew 
Gray, Alexander McKonkey, William Caldwell, John Duncan, William 
Gray, Jr., Matthew Gray, Jr., Andrew McFarland, Jr., John Graj^, 
Jr. ; "In ye fourth section of ye body" (with four English), James 
Thornington, John Battey, Oliver Wallis, Robert Blair ; " In ye fifth 
section of ye body" (all Scotch), James Forbush, John Alexander, 
William Mahan, John Stimson, Duncan Graham, John McFarland, 
Joseph Clark ; " In ye sixth section of ye body " (with three English 
families), John Patrick, James Glasford, John Sterling, Hugh Kelso; 
" In ye fore section of ye foremost gallery " (no Scotch) ; " In ye 
second section of ye foremost gallery" (with five English), Samuel 
Gray, Thomas Hamilton, Matthew Clark, William Temple ; " In ye 
fore section of ye long gallery " (with fourteen English), William 
McClellan, James McClellan, Joh-n Cishiel, Robert Barbour ; " In ye 
second section in ye long gallery" (with three English), Patrick 
Peebles, John McKonkey, Robert Marble, John Peebles. 

Three years after this apparently ostentatious patronage of the 
Presbyterians, the latter, having been compelled to contribute for 
eleven years to the support of the Rev. Mr. Burr without any pulpit 
or other recognition of their peculiar views, made a formal appeal 
to the justice of their fellow-townsmen in town meeting for relief 
from a tax inconsistent with their religious privileges. It was of no 
avail. The petition is not extant, since little care was taken to 
preserve the memorials of this unoffending but persecuted people, 
whose history discloses the injustice and intolerance of our English 
ancestors ; but the answer of the town of Worcester to their applica- 
tion is on record, and it is a curious specimen of an attempt to make 
the worse appear the better reason. One can hardly say whether 
there be in it more of Yankee subtlety or religious illiberality. It 
begins in this Avay : " In answer to the petition of John Clark and 
others, praying to be released from paying toward the support of 
the Rev. Isaac Burr, pastor of the church in this town, or any other 
except Mr. Johnston, the town, upon mature consideration, think 
that the request is unreasonable, and that they ought not to comply 



SCOTCn-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 15 

with it, upon many considerations." Thereupon follow four enu- 
merated and elaborate alleged reasons for refusal, no one of them, 
nor all of them together, expressing fully the real reasons. The 
first is a mere quibble ; the second asserts that, inasmuch as both 
churches follow substantially the Westminster Confession of Faith, 
" they may enjoy the same worship, ordinances, and Christian privi- 
leges, and means of their spiritual edification, with us, as in the 
way which they call Presbyterian, and their consciences not be 
imposed on in anything." As is usual in this kind of document, 
the third enumerated consideration falls into an accusing of the 
brethren, ''but we have rather reason to suppose that their separation 
from us is from some irregular views and motives, which it would 
be unworthy of us to countenance " ; and the fourth consideration I 
will quote in full, for the purpose of exhibiting its spirit : " We 
look upon the petitioners and others breaking off from us as they 
have done, as being full of irregularity and disorder, not to mention 
that the ordination of their minister was disorderly, even with 
respect to the principles which they themselves pretend to act by, 
as well as with respect to us, to whom they stand related, and with 
whom they cohabit, and enjoy with us in common all proper social, 
civil, and Christian rights and privileges ; their separating from us 
being contrary to the public establishment and laws of this Province ; 
contrary to their own covenant with us, and unreasonably weaken- 
ing to the town, whose numbers and dimensions (the north part 
being excepted by the vote from paying to Mr. Burr) will not admit 
of the honorable support of two ministers of the gospel, and tending 
to cause and cherish divisions and parties, greatly destructive to 
our civil and religious interests, and the peace, tranquillity, and 
happiness." 

It is hardly necessary to add that these masterful bits of logic, 
from which almost all of the formal fallacies of the books might be 
illustrated, carried the town by a large majority. This was in 1736. 
It gave rise to two distinct impulses among the Presbyterians : first, 
to build a meeting-house of their own, in which "Mr. Johnston" 
might officiate, which there was no law to prevent; and second, 
among individuals of better fortune and more independence than 
the rest, to shake off the dust of their feet for a testimony against 
the infinitesimal bigotry of Worcester Puritans, and go elsewhere. 

The Worcester Registry of Deeds bears ample evidence that 
many farms in the "north part" of the town, where the Scotch-Irish 
were specially located, and where the "Old Fort" stood in which 
they sometimes worshiped, changed hands in 1737, and in the years 



16 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

immediately following. John Gray, for example, and each of three 
sons of his, made significani: conveyances of land in Worcester in 
that interval ; and it is quite noticeable that the name of John 
Clark, the first to sign the petition to the town of Worcester for 
exemption from church taxes in behalf of himself and fellow signers, 
stands prominent a couple of years later among the first settlers of 
the Scotch-Irish town of Colerain, fifty miles to the northwest 
of Worcester, so named from the old Ulster town on the Bann. 
The Morrisons, Pennells, Herrouns, Hendersons, Cochranes, Hunters, 
Henrys, Clarks, McClellans, McCowens, Taggarts, and McDowells, 
many of whom had been previous settlers in Worcester, were the 
chief families in this frontier and Presbyterian town, now on the 
border of Vermont. 

But the most striking proof of the discontent of the folks of our 
blood with their church-treatment in Worcester was the formal 
organization there in 1738, two years after the contemptuous rejec- 
tion of their petition, of a company consisting of thirty-four families 
to purchase and settle a new town on principles in keeping with 
their own. Thus originated Pelham, about thirty miles west of 
Worcester. Robert Peebles and James Thornington (afterward 
spelled Thornton) were a committee to contract with Colonel John 
Stoddard and others, who owned the territory. In the contract 
occurs this passage : " It is agreed that families of good connection 
be settled on the premises, who shall be such as were the inhabitants 
of the Kingdom of Ireland or their descendants, being Protestants, 
and none to be admitted but such as bring good and undeniable 
credentials or certificates of their being persons of good conversation 
and of the Presbyterian persuasion as used in the Church of Scot- 
land, and conform to the discipline thereof." 

The first meeting of these proprietors was held in Worcester at 
the house of Captain Daniel Haywood in February, 1739, and all 
subsequent meetings of the proprietors were held in Worcester, until 
in August, 1740, when a meeting was held in the new township at 
the house of John Ferguson. At this first meeting in their own 
new town it was "voted to build a meeting-house, to raise £100 
towards building it, and choose a committee to agree with a work- 
man to raise the house and provide for the settling of a minister." 
Subsequent to this, £220 were raised in two installments for the 
erection and completion of the structure. In the spring of 1743 
two meetings were held in the new meeting-house, and measures 
were then taken '' to glaze the meeting-house, to build a pulpit, and 
underpin the house at the charge of the town." The first pastor 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 17 

they called to settle was their old quasi-pastor at AVorcester, Rev. 
Mr. Johnston, who had in the meantime removed to Londonderry, 
N. H. ; but he naturally enough declined the call. But Robert 
Abercrombie, a native of Edinburgh, a profound scholar, and pos- 
sessor of a library surpassed by few in its time, and which has been 
kept together till the present time, began to preach to the people 
in the summer of 1742. His ordination sermon was preached by 
the famous Jonathan Edwards, and he remained a steadfast friend 
and coadjutor of that persecuted servant of God throughout his 
subsequent troubles in the neighboring Northampton. It is worth 
noting that the public school of Pelham was kept in the new meet- 
ing-house for about ten years, when it was "voted to build three 
school-houses, one at the Meeting-house, one at the West End of the 
town, and one on the East Hill." 

Now, notwithstanding these repeated drafts on the home colony 
and church at Worcester, to Colerain and Pelham and elsewhere, 
those who remained there were still determined to build a meeting- 
house of their own. They had been weakened, but not disheartened. 
They naturally chose a site near to the " Old Fort," which had been 
to them more or less a worshiping-place, on the " Boston road," not 
far from the center of their scattered homesteads. I have often 
been in the neighborhood of this place, and am confident I can point 
out the spot within a very few rods. In their extreme poverty 
they raised the needful moneys, the timber was brought to the site, 
framed and raised, and the building in the earlier progress of con- 
struction, when the other inhabitants of Worcester, many of them 
persons of consideration and respectability and professed piety, 
gathered tumultuously in the night-time, leveled the structure with 
the ground, sawed the timbers, and burnt or carried off the pieces 
and other materials. This was in 1740. The defenseless, but in- 
dignant strangers were compelled to submit to this infamous wrong. 
The English Puritans and their irresponsible hangers-on chose, 
indeed, the night-time for their mob-violence and devilish meanness, 
but no blackness of darkness can ever cover up a deed like this ; no 
sophistries, no neighborhood mis-affinities, no town votes, no race 
jealousies, no wretched shibboleth of any name, can ever wipe out 
that stain. The blood of English Puritans and of Scotch Presby- 
terians mingles in my veins ; my great-grandfather Perry, my 
grandfather of the same name, my uncle, too, in the same line, 
officiated as deacons for ninety-four successive years in the old 
South Church on the Common, which originated and perpetrated 
this outrage on humanity ; nevertheless, I give my feeble word of 



18 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

utter condemnation for this shameless act of bigotry, the details of 
which I learned as a little boy at my mother's knee. 

The motives to a still further exodus from Worcester on the part 
of the Scotch were of course still further intensified by this scanda- 
lous destruction of their property in 1740, and it is significant, that 
the third and fourth purely Scotch-Irish towns in Massachusetts, 
namely. Western (now Warren), in Worcester County, and Bland- 
ford, in Hampden County, were both incorporated the next year, 
1741. These two towns, even more than the two earlier ones. Pel- 
ham and Colerain, have continued and still remain in the hands of 
the descendants of the Worcester families. In Blandford the families 
of Blair, Boise, Knox, Carnahan, Watson, Wilson, and Ferguson 
were prominent ; and in Western some of the same names, especially 
the Blair s, with Reeds and Crawfords, and many more. Notwith- 
standing these successive migrations from Worcester, a very con- 
siderable number of families remained there; among them, the 
McClellans, the Caldwells, the Blairs, the McFarlands, the Rankin s, 
the Grays, the Crawfords, the Youngs, the Hamiltons, the Dun- 
cans, the Grahams, the Forbushes, the Kelsos, the Clarks, the 
Fergusons, the McClintocks, the McKonkeys, the Glasfords, and 
the McGregors. The later movement of individual families from 
Worcester and Pelham and Colerain and Western and Blandford 
carried Scotch-Irish blood into every town of Western Massachu- 
setts, and ultimately into most of the towns of Vermont, while the 
reflex movement from and into Massachusetts to and from the con- 
temporary settlements in New Hampshire and Maine, soon to be 
characterized, served to keep in touch and sympathy, in mutual 
acquaintance and interchange of ministers, and more or less of 
intermarriage, all these local centers of our race in New England. 

The two most distinguished men who have come out from this 
Worcester branch of the great migration of 1718, have been Dr. 
Matthew Thornton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, 
and Professor Asa Gray, at the time of his death the most accom- 
plished botanist in the world. 

Matthew Thornton (or Thornington, as the name was then spelled) 
was a lad of four years when the five ships zigzagged into Boston 
Harbor. His father, James Thornton, instead of going to Worcester 
directly that autumn, was one of a company — Willis estimates them 
at about three hundred — who wintered on shipboard in Portland 
Harbor. In the spring, with few others, he settled at Wiscasset, in 
the Kennebec country. After a very few years there, we find both 
father and son in Worcester, where the boy received whatever 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 19 

primary education he had, and after studying medicine, which was 
rudely taught in those days, commenced practice in Londonderry, 
among those who were from his native land, and who proverbially 
possess warm national remembrances. Here he acquired a wide 
reputation as a physician, and in the course of several years of 
successful practice became comparatively rich for those times. He 
also sustained several public offices, taking, as Scotch-Irishmen are 
wont to do, an active and influential part in the public affairs of his 
locality. 

He became surgeon to a regiment of New Hampshire men in the 
famous expedition against Cape Breton under Pepperell in 1745; 
and it is related of his regiment of live hundred men that only six 
died previously to the surrender of Louisburg, although a company 
from Londonderry commanded by Captain John Mooar, were employed 
for fourteen successive nights, with straps over their shoulders, and 
sinking to their knees in mud, in drawing cannon from the landing- 
place to the camp, through a morass. Scotch-Irishmen always hated 
the French next to the Devil ! 

At the breaking out of the Revolution, Thornton held the post 
of colonel in the New Hampshire militia, and had also been com-, 
missioned a justice of the peace by Benning Wentworth, acting under 
British authority ; but after Lexington and Concord, on the 19th of 
April, 1775, John Wentworth, then governor, retired from the gov- 
ernment of New Hampshire and went to England. Under these 
circumstances the colony called a " Provincial Convention," of which 
Thornton was appointed president. There was no state constitution 
as yet, and no declaration of independence, but there was no other 
constituted government in the province besides this provincial con- 
vention, and I am fond of thinking, and believe it to be historically 
correct to affirm, that this extemporized but indispensable Ncav 
Hampshire convention, presided over by a Scotch-Irishman, Ulster- 
born, was the first independent sovereignty upon this continent ! 
It certainly assumed the functions of an independent government 
in the name of the people of the Colony. 

Thereafter the public career of Matthew Thornton, both in state 
and nation, is well known to the world; and a station on the Railroad 
from Boston to Concord commemorates in its name, "Thornton's 
Perry," a fine estate on the banks of the Merrimac, confiscated by 
New Hampshire from its then Tory owner, which later became by 
purchase the home and last resting-place of the first of our kith and 
kin to gain a national reputation here in the line of statesmanship. 

An anecdote of Judge Thornton has been preserved which may 



20 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

serve to illustrate the keen and ready wit possessed by him in 
common with most of the Scotch-Irish race. In his old age, 1798^ 
he happened to attend a session of the New Hampshire legislature, 
which met in a town adjoining his own. He was eighty -four years 
old. He had served many years before in all three branches of the 
legislature. Meeting at this time an old Londonderry neighbor, 
Avho was now a member of the House, the latter asked the judge if 
he did not think the legislature had improved very much since the 
old days when he held a seat ? if it did not have more men of natural 
and acquired abilities, and more eloquent speakers than formerly, 
" for then," said he, " you know that there were but five or six who 
could make speeches, but now all we farmers can make speeches." 
"To answer that question, I will tell you a story I remember to 
have heard related of an old gentleman, a farmer, who lived but a 
short distance from my father's residence in Ireland. This old 
gentleman was very exemplary in his observance of religious duties, 
and made it a constant practice to read a portion of Scripture 
morning and evening before addressing the Throne of Grace. It 
happened one morning that he was reading the chapter which gives 
an account of Samson catching three hundred foxes, when the old 
lady, his wife, interrupted him by saying, 'John, I'm sure that 
canna' be true ; for our Isaac was as good a fox-hunter as there ever 
was in the country, and he never caught but about twenty.' ' Hooh ! 
Janet,' replied the old gentleman, 'ye mauna' always tak' the 
Scripture just as it reads; perhaps in the three hundred there might 
ha' been aughteen, or may be twanty, that were real foxes ; the rest 
were all skunks and woodchucks.' " 

Professor Asa Gray, the cosmopolitan botanist, was born in Paris, 
N. Y., in 1810, and died in his seventy-eighth year, in Cambridge, 
the seat of his labors and the center of his fame. He was a great- 
great-grandson of the first Matthew Gray of Worcester, to whom I 
also stand in the same genealogical relation. Some ten years ago 
I spent, by invitation, an evening at his house, in order to unfold to 
him a little the story of our common ancestors in Worcester. He 
was very courteous, and apparently attentive ; but I soon discovered 
that the drift and training of his mind had led him to care vastly 
more about the genealogy and physiology of plants the world over 
than about the genealogy and mode of life of that Scotch-Irish 
ancestry from whom, nevertheless, he derived directly all the peculiar 
traits of his own mental activity. He was canny, absorbed, analytic, 
comprehensive, religiously consecrated. 

In 1885, on attaining his seventy-fifth year, he was the recipient 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 21 

of a large and beautiful silver vase, the gift of the botanists of the 
United States to their honored master, and a flood of congratulations 
from friends at home and abroad. The following terse and appro- 
priate lines were sent by James Russell Lowell : 

' ' Kind Fate, prolong the days well spent, 
Whose indefatigable hours 
Have been as gaily innocent 
And fragrant as his flowers." 

Comparatively early in life he became a member of most of the 
learned societies of the world, and at length even the most exclusive 
gladly opened their doors to him. The Royal Society of London 
was one of these, and he was also one of the " immortal eight " 
foreign members of the French Institute. During his last visit to 
Europe, the last summer of his life, he was received with distin- 
guished honors everywhere, among which were the highest degrees 
ever conferred by the great universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and 
Edinburgh. 

He himself tersely and modestly stated his own fundamental 
beliefs as follows : " I am, scientifically and in my own fashion, a 
Darwinian ; philosophically, a convinced Theist ; and religiously, an 
accepter of the creed commonly called the Nicene, as the exponent 
of the Christian faith." 

2. Lo]srDO>^DEKKY. Tlic core of the company that settled Lon- 
donderry, IST. H., in April, 1719, consisted of sixteen men, with their 
families, namely : James McKeen, John Barnett, Archibald Clen- 
denin, John Mitchell, James Sterrett, James Anderson, Randall 
Alexander, James Gregg, James Clark, James Nesmith, Allen An- 
derson, Robert Weir, John Morrison, Samuel Allison, Thomas Steele, 
John Stuart. Thirteen of these men lived to an average age of 
seventy-nine years ; six of them attained to nearly ninety, and two 
of them overpassed that limit ; and one, John Morrison, lived to 
see ninety-seven years. All of the Scotch-Irish of that generation, 
vfherever they located in Xew England, unless their personal habits 
were such as shorten life, attained on the average to a very advanced 
age. The pioneers in this second settlement were most of them 
men in middle life, robust and persevering, and adventurous and 
strong-willed, fronting death with no thought of surrender. Most 
of them were the descendants of Scotch Covenanters who had passed 
over to Ulster later than the mass of the settlers there ; and they 
had kept together in church relations, as well as in residence, more 
closely than most of the Scotch settlers. Their residence, was in 



22 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

the valley of the Bann, mostly on the Antrim side of the river, in or 
near the towns or parishes of Coleraine, Ballymoney, Ballymena, 
Bally watick, and Kilrea; and when they decided to emigrate, they 
still wished to keep together in church relations ; and those of them 
who had been under the pastoral charge of E,ev. James McGregor, 
who came with them, especially the McKeen families and their 
numerous connections, desired to form a distinct settlement here 
and become again the charge of their beloved pastor. 

With this end in view, about twenty families, taking others with 
them, amounting in all (as Willis estimated) to three hundred 
persons, sailed from Boston in the late autumn to explore Casco 
Bay for a home, under a promise from Governor Shute of a grant of 
land whenever and wherever they decided iipon a location in any 
still unappropriated quarter in New England. They wintered, hun- 
gry and cold, in Portland harbor. In the early spring they explored 
to the eastward, but there is no record how far they went or what 
they found. It is enough for our present purpose that Maine 
seemed to offer no genial home to those sea-worn and weather-beaten 
voyagers. Though they left a few of their number in Portland, 
to whom we shall recur later, and probably a larger number on 
the Kennebec at or near Wiscasset, the bulk determined to seek a 
milder climate and a more favorable location. Undoubtedly, while 
still in Boston their attention had been called to Southern New 
Hampshire as well as to Maine, both at that time under the juris- 
diction of the governor of Massachusetts, for they sailed directly 
back to the mouth of the Merrimac and anchored at Haverhill, on 
that river, where they heard of a fine tract of land about fifteen 
miles to the northward, then called Nutfield, on acoouut of the 
abundance of the chestnut and walnut and butternut trees which, in 
connection with the pines, distinguished the growth of its forests. 
A party, under the lead of James McKeen, grandfather of the first 
president of Bowdoin College, and brother-in-law of Pastor McGre- 
gor, went up and examined the tract ; and ascertaining that it was 
not appropriated, they decided at once to take up here the grant 
obtained from the government of Massachusetts of a township 
twelve miles square of any of her unappropriated lands. 

Having selected the spot on which to commence their settlement, 
and having built a few temporary huts on a little brook which they 
called "West-Running Brook," a tributary of Beaver Brook, which 
falls into the Merrimac at Lowell, and leaving two or three of their 
number in charge, they returned to Haverhill to bring on their 
families, their provisions, their implements of labor, and household 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 23 

utensils. Mr, McGregor and some others had passed the winter at 
Dracut, on Beaver Brook, just north of Lowell ; and two parties, 
one from Dracut and the other from Haverhill, were soon converging 
through the forests toward West-Running Brook, when they met, 
as tradition says, at a place ever after called "Horse Hill," from 
the fact that both parties there tied their horses while the men 
surveyed the territory around as the future home. This day was 
April 11, old style, 1719. The next day, having in the meantime 
explored with the leaders more fully what they had selected for the 
township, the good pastor, under a large oak on the east side of 
Beaver Pond, delivered to his people, now partially re-united, the 
first sermon ever preached in that region — Isaiah 32, 2: "And a 
man shall be as a hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the 
tempest ; as rivers of water in a dry place ; as the shadow of a 
great rock in a weary land." The spot where this religious service 
was held, especially the tree around which these hardy pioneers 
assembled, was for a long period regarded with great reverence by 
the people of Londonderry. When at last it decayed and fell, the 
owner of the field in which it stood planted a young apple tree 
among its rotten roots, which now serves, and will long serve, to 
designate the venerated spot. 

These first families, in order to secure the advantages of near 
neighborhood, and be better able to protect themselves against the 
attacks of the Indians, with which all the New England colonies 
were at that time threatened, planted their log-houses on each side 
of West-Eunning Brook, on home-lots but thirty rods wide and 
extending back on a north and south line till they inclosed sixty 
acres each. These lots constituted what has ever since been called 
the Double Range. For fifty years or more this range continued 
to be a populous section of the town. The first season the settlers 
cultivated a field alongside the brook, then and ever since called the 
" Common Field " ; but the best land in the township was not in 
that section, for it lay too low, and as each settler had allotted to 
him another sixty acres elsewhere, after a while the lowland began 
to be deserted of houses, and nothing is now to be seen along the 
Double Range but meadows, dotted here and there by the cellar-holes 
of these earliest planters. No price was paid for the land, since it 
was the free gift of King William to his loyal subjects of the old 
country, some of them faithful champions of his throne in the siege 
and defense of Londonderry. 

The first dwellings were, of course, of logs, and covered with 
bark. It is to be noticed, however, that in these exiles for right- 



24 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

eousness' sake, sound and pious as they were, there was as much 
human nature to the square inch as in the rest of mankind. When 
John Morrison was building his house in the Double Range his 
wife came to him, and in a persuasive, affectionate manner said to 
him, " Aweel, aweel, dear Joan, an' it maun be a log-house, do make 
it a log heegher nor the lave" (than the rest). Beaver Brook, 
however, tumbles well in its course from the pond to the Merrimac, 
and saw-mills were soon built, and within a year or two good framed 
houses were erected; the first for Pastor McGregor, only quite 
recently demolished, and the second by John McMurphy,- Esq., 
who bore a commission as justice of the peace, dated in Ireland, and 
so antedated the commission signed by Governor Shute, April 29, 
1720, to Justice James McKeen, in some sense the foremost man of 
the settlement. 

Two stone garrison-houses, strongly built and well prepared to 
resist an attack of the Indians, were put up the first season; and 
to these the several families retired at night whenever, for any 
reason, special danger from that source was apprehended. But it is 
remarkable that neither in Lovell's War, when Londonderry was 
strictly a frontier town, nor in either of the two subsequent French 
and Indian wars, did any hostile force from the northward ever even 
approach that town. Tradition has always been busy in ascribing 
the signal preservation of this colony from the attacks of the 
Indians to the influence of Pastor McGregor over Governor Vaud- 
reuil of Canada. It is said that they had known each other in the 
Old World at college ; that a correspondence was kept up between 
them on this side the water; that at the request of his friend 
the governor caused means to be used for the protection of the 
settlement; that he induced the Catholic priests to charge the 
Indians not to injure any of these people, as they were different 
from the English, and that the warriors were assured beforehand 
that no bounty would be paid for such scalps, and no sins forgiven 
to those who killed them. It is certain that the early inhabitants 
of Londonderry believed in all these assertions ; and it is some 
confirmation of them that a manuscript sermon of McGregor's, still 
extant, has on the margin the name and various titles of the Mar- 
quis Vaudreuil, by which, of course, he would be addressed upon 
occasion. 

At any rate, the earliest pioneers were much indebted to the 
volunteer services of an Indian of some tribe and connection. Taking 
Mr. McGregor to a high hill, he pointed to a tall pine some nine 
miles distant, and told him that in that direction and neighborhood 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 25 

there were falls in the river, where he would find an abundance of 
fish. By the help of his compass the pastor, with a few of the 
settlers, was able to mark out a course to Amoskeag Falls, where 
the city of Manchester now stands, and with a scoop-net, which they 
had provided, readily secured an ample supply of salmon and shad, 
with which the Merrimac then abounded. This was for a long time 
a valuable resource to the inhabitants of Londonderry. The salted 
fish constituted an important article of their food, especially before 
their new fields became productive. But tlieir food at best was 
scant and poor for many years. Bean porridge, barley broth, hasty 
pudding, samp and potatoes, were the chief reliance. 

In securing a perfectly valid title to their lands, and the demo- 
cratic privileges of a town corporate, the people of Londonderry 
experienced no little embarrassment. The executive jurisdiction of 
Governor Shute over the territory was acknowledged by everybody, 
and the validity of his grant to them of the land in the king's 
name ; but could they also get a prior title direct from the original 
Indian chiefs claiming to own the land ? Kev. John Wheelright of 
Exeter had obtained by fair purchase, in 1629, from the four princi- 
pal Sagamores, all the territory lying between the river Piscataqua 
and the Merrimac. Colonel John Wheelright of Wells, Me., had 
inherited from his grandfather that portion of this right now occu- 
pied by the Scotch-Irish ; and he gave to a committee of these, 
partly at the instance of Lieutenant-Governor Wentworth of New 
Hampshire, a formal deed of the land ten miles square, correspond- 
ing to the grant of Governor Shute ; and in consideration of this 
service both Wheelright and Wentworth received certain lots of 
land in Londonderry, which proved in the sequel to be some of 
the best farms in the town. 

Before this was accomplished, however, appeared the first state 
paper of the Scotch-Irish in America, the original of which is now 
among the collections of the New Hampshire Historical Society, 
which I proceed to quote in full, because it shows there were men 
among them — probably in this case James Gregg and Robert Wear, 
who signed it — who knew how to put sharp points into clean words, 
and especially because it shows that they thoroughly appreciated 
already the town-government system of New England, and wanted 
all its advantages for themselves : 

"The humble petition of the people late from Ireland, now 
settled at Nutfield, to His Excellency the Governour and General 
Court assembled at Portsmouth, Sept. 23, 1719, — Humbly sheweth : 
That your petitioners having made application to the General Court 



26 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

met at Boston in October last, and having obtained a grant for a 
township in any part of their unappropriated lands, took encourage- 
ment thereupon to settle at Nutfield about the Eleventh of April 
last, which is situated by estimation about fourteen miles from 
Haverel meeting-house to the North-west, and about fifteen miles 
from Dracut meeting-house on the Eiver Merrimack north and 
by east. That your petitioners since their settlement have found 
that the said Nutfield is claimed by three or four different parties 
by virtue of Indian deeds, yet none of them offered any dis- 
turbance to your i^etitioners except one party from Newbury and 
Salem. Their deed from one John, Indian, bears date March 13, 
Anno Dom. 1701, and imparts that they had made a purchase of 
said land for five pounds. By virtue of this deed they claim ten 
miles square westward from Heverel line ; and one Caleb Moody of 
Newbury, in their name, discharged our people from clearing or any 
way improving the said land, unless we agreed that 20 or 25 families 
at most should dwell there, and that all the rest of the land should 
be reserved for them. That your petitioners by reading the grant 
of the Crown of Great Britain to the Province of Massachusetts Bay, 
which determineth their northern line three miles from the River 
Merrimack from any and every part of the River, and by advice 
from such as were more capable to judge of this affair are satis- 
fied that the said Nutfield is within his majesties province of New 
Hampshire, which we are further confirmed in, because the General 
Court met at Boston in May last upon our renewed application, did 
not think fit any way to intermeddle Avith the said land. That your 
petitioners, therefore, embrace this opportunity of addressing this 
Honorable Court, praying that their township may consist of ten 
miles square, or in a figure equivalent to it, they being in number 
about seventy families and inhabitants, and more of their friends 
arrived from Ireland to settle with them, and many of the people 
of New England settling with them ; and that they being so nu- 
merous, may be erected into a township with its usual privileges, 
and have a power of making town officers and laws. That, being a 
frontier place, they may the better subsist by government amongst 
them, and may be more strong and full of inhabitants. That your 
petitioners being descended from, and professing the faith and 
principles of, the established Church of North Britain, and loyal 
subjects of the British Crown in the family of his majesty King 
George, and encouraged by the happy administration of his majesties 
chief governour in these provinces [Gov. Shute], and the favorable 
inclination of the good people of New England to their brethren, 



SCOTCH-IEISII IN NEW ENGLAND. 27 

adventuring to come over and plant in this vast wilderness, humbly 
expect a favorable answer from this Honourable Court, and your 
petitioners as in duty bound shall ever pray, etc. Subscribed at 
Nutfield in the name of our people, Sept. 21, 1719." • 

Under the auspices, perhaps it would be proper to say patronage, 
of Lieutenant-Governor Wentworth, Nutfield was incorporated as a 
town in June, 1722, containing ten square miles indeed, but not 
equilateral, ''duly bounded," panhandled, gerrymandered, so as to 
reach up to their fishing station on the Merrimac at Amoskeag Falls 
— this portion afterward called Derryfield, and now Manchester. 
The following entry upon the town record must not only be viewed 
as a genuine token of gratitude for past favors received, but also in 
part as expressing a sense of pre-thankfulness for " the substance of 
things hoped for " : " The people of ISTutfield do acknowledge with 
gratitude the obligation they are under to the Hon. John Wentworth, 
Esq., Lieutenant-Governor of New Hampshire. They remember 
with pleasure, that His Honor, on all occasions, showed a great deal 
of civility and real kindness to them, being strangers in the country, 
and cherished the small beginnings of their settlement and defended 
them from the encroachment and violence of such as upon unjust 
grounds would have disturbed their settlement, and always gave 
them a favorable ear and easy access to government, and procured 
justice for them, and established order, and promoted peace and 
good government amongst them; giving them always the most 
wholesome and seasonable advice, both with respect to the purity 
and liberty of the gospel, and the management of their secular con- 
cerns, and put arms and ammunition into their hands to defend 
them from the fears and dangers of the Indians ; and contributed 
liberally, by his influence and example, to the building of a house 
for the worship of God ; so that, under God, Ave own him for the 
patron and guardian of our settlement, and erect this monument 
of gratitude to the name and family of Wentworth, to be had in 
the greatest veneration by the present generation and the latest 
posterity." 

In the meantime and afterward, the people of the town now 
christened Londonderry at its incorporation, though the ancestors 
of most of them came from the parallel valley dividing County 
Antrim from County Londonderry, — the siege and defense of the 
Ulster town in which some of them had taken a personal part giving 
that name the preference, — were surveying their heritage, building 
their first meeting-house, and laying out upon the higher grounds 
new ranges for farms. Among the first of these was the English 



28 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

Eange, so-called, to accommodate a few heads of families from 
Massachusetts who had cast in their lot with, and were welcomed 
by, the Scotch-Irish. Number One on the English Range was 
assigned to Joseph Simonds, who was one of the first twenty heads 
of families, who was one of the four undertakers to build in 1719 
the first saw-mill on Beaver Brook, and who (which is much less 
worth the mention) was one of the great-great-great-grandfathers of 
my children. A few weeks ago I had myself driven leisurely in a 
buggy over all parts of ancient Londonderry ; I crossed the original 
farm of Joseph Simonds, No. 1 in the English Range, and was told 
by Mr. Choate, proprietor of the same or adjoining estate, that "the 
best lands in Londonderry were on the English Range " ; I rode, 
also, over the crest of Aiken's Range, and along the brook bearing 
the same name, and farther west toward the so-called High Range, 
past the second-built church, and then bearing east past the site 
of Dr. Morrison's church, and near the place of the Hill church 
and graveyard, and, crossing the railroad again, with Beaver Pond 
on the left, climbed the hill past the original meeting-house, which 
John Wentworth helped to build, and the original graveyard there, 
— God's own sown field, — and on the road towards Parson Mc- 
Gregor's first framed house, touched the highest land in old Lon- 
donderry ; whence returning to Derry village, we crossed the old 
"West-Running Brook," and passed also by the "Common Eield," 
and on Beaver Brook again, the place of the first saw-mill, which 
Joseph Simonds helped to build, and where logs have been rolled 
in and boards tossed out from that day to this. 

It was not all harmony in state or church in ancient Londonderry. 
The town thrived and the congregation became very large. " Many 
men of many minds." The Scotch-Irish were a straight-thinking 
and a plain-speaking people. Parson McGregor died in 1729. Though 
but a youth at the time, he took part in the defense of the Ulster 
Derry, and always claimed to have himself discharged the large guns 
from the tower of the cathedral which announced to the starving 
besieged below the approach of the ships up the Foyle that brought 
them the final relief. Soon after the death of McGregor, Rev. 
Matthew Clark, then seventy years old, came direct from Ireland to 
Londonderry, and was asked to su.pply the desk and take pastoral 
care, but not to become formal pastor. There is extant an original 
portrait of this man, representing him with a black patch around 
the outer angle of the right eye, the patch covering a wound that 
refused to heal, received in one of the sallies of the besieged at 
Londonderry. He had been an officer in the Protestant army during 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 29 

the civil commotions in King William's time, and had been partic- 
ularly active in the defense of Derry. It is related of him that, 
while sitting as moderator of the presbytery, the martial music of 
a training band passing by recalled the smoldering fires of his 
youth, and made him incapable for a little time to attend to his 
duties, and his reply to the repeated calls of the brethren was, "Nae 
business while I hear the toot o' the drum ! " and when he died at 
the age of seventy -six, in January, 1735, in compliance with his 
special request on his death-bed, his remains were borne to the 
grave by those only who had been his fellow-soldiers and fellow- 
sufferers in the siege of Londonderry ! This is at once the most 
picturesque and the most pathetic scene in the story of the Scotch- 
Irish in New England. Forty-five years after the event, this modern 
Israel, this " Warrior of God," in two senses, borne along between 
the mingled pines and nut-trees of a new God's acre in the wilder- 
ness, by those only who, with him, had stood to the outermost verge 
of their lives for the faith once delivered to the saints ! 

Two years after the death of Matthew Clark, David McGregor, 
son of the first minister, who had received his literary and theological 
education chiefly under the tuition of Clark, himself an imiversity- 
bred man, took pastoral charge of the new West Parish in London- 
derry. Two meeting-houses had already been built in this parish 
— one on Aiken's Eange, and the other, called the Hill Meeting- 
house, nearly a mile west. Here were the seeds of a deep-seated 
and long-continued quarrel. Moreover, there was great dissatisfac- 
tion with Mr. Davidson, the third pastor in the old parish. The 
population was increasing, and was already beginning to diffuse 
itself into new settlements in the neighborhood. At a sacramental 
season in 1734, only fifteen years from the first settlement, there 
were present, according to the church records, seven hundred com- 
municants. The everlasting place-of-the-meeting-house question, 
which has wrought more plague and alienation in New England 
than all theological dogmas put together, was stirring up the min- 
isters and the sessions and the people into a hotch-potch ; and this, 
as at Worcester, with other matters of disagreement, intensified the 
spirit of separation, and multiplied in course of time new colonies 
going forth to post themselves elsewhere. During the quarter- 
century preceding the Revolution, ten distinct settlements were 
made by emigrants from Londonderry, all of Avhich became towns 
of influence and importance in New Hampshire. Two strong town- 
ships in Vermont, and two in Nova Scotia, were settled from the 
same source within the same time ; besides which, numerous families. 



30 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

sometimes singly and sometimes in groups, went off in all directions, 
especially northward and westward, up the Connecticut River and 
over the ridge of the Green Mountains, to carry everywhere the 
sturdy qualities, the fixed opinions, and the lasting grudges charac- 
teristic of Scotch-Irishmen. 

Neither the crown nor the colonies ever appealed in vain to 
these brave people, now widely scattered, for help in the old French 
wars. Not a route to Ticonderoga or Crown Point but was tramped 
again and again by the firm-set feet of these New England Prot- 
estants. They were with Colonel Williams in the " bloody morning 
scout " at the head of Lake George in 1755, and in the battle with 
Dieskau that followed : they were with Stark and Lord Howe under 
Abercrombie in the terrible defeat at Ticonderoga in 1758 ; many of 
them toiled under General Amherst at his great stone fort at Crown 
Point in 1759, whose broken ruins even astound us to-day; and 
others still were with General Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham 
the same year, where and when was fought the most vital and de- 
cisive battle ever seen upon this continent. Major Robert Rogers, 
the famous commander of the three companies of rangers raised by 
New Hampshire in 1756, was himself a native of Londonderry, and 
most of his men were enlisted in the same locality. 

When it came to the Revolution, however, Rogers's loyalty to 
the English king, for whom he had risked his life in numberless 
scouts and fights, overrode his sense of the grievance of the colonies, 
and he was proscribed as a Tory by the act of New Hampshire. 
Not so John Stark. Stark was captain of one of Rogers's companies 
of rangers, and at one time commanded the whole corps, with the 
rank of major. Rogers went to England in 1777, and Stark, the 
same year, went to Bennington ! In August next will be consecrated 
there, with fitting ceremonial, to national and local liberty, a lime- 
stone shaft three hundred and one feet high, whose foundations are 
cut into the solid and everlasting rock — a shaft paid for from out 
the treasuries of the three states which furnished Stark his men for 
that fight ; from out the treasury of the United States, under whose 
colors, a little later, he fought Burgoyne in person at Saratoga, and 
from out the scattered contributions of patriotic men and women all 
over the land ; a shaft which will stand a silent witness for many 
things and many men — for the Berkshire militia, for the Green 
Mountain Boys and the Catamount tavern, but most of all for John 
Stark, the most distinguished Scotch-Irishman of New England, a 
native of Londonderry, and for the seventy Derry volunteers who 
went with him to Bennington, and whose names are of record, and 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 31 

for Robert McGregor, a grandson of the old pastor, who was on 
Stark's staff in 1777 ! 

Colonel George Reid, another native of Londonderry, pure blood, 
held a command in the New Hampshire forces during the entire war 
of the Revolution ; was in the battles of Bunker Hill, Long Island, 
White Plains, Trenton, Brandywine, Germantown, Saratoga, and 
Stillwater ; was with the army in all their hardships at Valley 
Forge during the severe winter of '77-78. He took an efficient 
part in Sullivan's expedition against the Six Nations, and was in 
chief command at Albany during the last summer of the war. After- 
ward he was appointed by his old commander and companion-in- 
arms, General Sullivan, then president of the state of New Hamp- 
shire, to command, as brigadier-general, all the forces of the state 
in a most critical juncture of the civil and military affairs of that 
section. 

It is not so generally known that James Miller, who brought out 
more reputation from our last war with Great Britain at the northward 
than any other American save Winfield Scott, was a Scotch-Irishman 
out of the loins of Londonderry. He was born in Peterborough, 
N. H., in 1776 ; studied for a while in his youth at Williams College, 
in Massachusetts ; became interested more or less in military affairs, 
and was recommended to the War Department at Washington by 
General Benjamin Pierce, father of the late President, and was com- 
missioned major in the Fourth U. S. Infantry, March 3, 1809, the 
last day of Jefferson's administration. The war with England soon 
breaking out, young Miller was ordered to Indiana Territory under 
General Harrison, and his regiment was in the battle of Tippecanoe. 
Under General Hull at Detroit, James Miller and Lewis Cass, both 
young officers in the army, and the two becoming thereafter life- 
long friends, planted with their hands the United States flag on 
Canada soil, at Sandwich, July 14, 1812. Both were afterward 
taken prisoners with Hull, though Cass snapped his sword before 
surrendering it; and both made public complaint of what they 
deemed the cowardice of Hull, on the basis of which and other like 
testimony he was tried by court-martial and condemned, but was 
pardoned by the President, and lived to vindicate his action in a 
pamphlet now generally regarded as exculpatory and triumphant. 

After Miller was exchanged he was put into command of the 
Twenty-seventh Regulars, and ordered to the Niagara frontier under 
General Jacob Brown. The story of the battle of Lundy's Lane is 
known to all Americans ; but I have recently had the pleasure of 
reading a letter written by Colonel Miller three or four days after 



32 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

the battle to his wife — ''My Beloved Ruth" — in which he gives 
interesting details of the storming of the battery and the capture of 
the cannon, which are not down in the books. Brown's order to 
him, as he transcribes it for his wife, is a little different from what 
it stands in the histories — " Colonel, take your regiment, storm 
that work, and take it ! " " I'll try, sir ! " 

With three hundred men he moved steadily up the hill in the 
darkness, along a fence lined with thick bushes, that hid his troops 
from the view of the gunners and their protectors, who lay near. 
When within short musket range of the battery, they could see the 
gunners, with their glowing linstocks ready to act at the word Fire ! 
Selecting good marksmen, Miller directed each to rest his rifle on 
the fence, select a gunner, and fire at a given signal. Very soon 
every gunner fell, when the colonel and his men rushed forward and 
captured the battery — not, however, until a terrible hand-to-hand 
fight in the darkness with the protectors of the guns had ensued. 
The British fell back. Rallying, and being re-inforced by three 
hundred men sent forward by Drummond at Queenstown, they were 
repulsed the second time. Let Miller tell the rest of the story in 
Avords to his wife : " After Generals Brown, Scott, and others were 
wounded, we were ordered to return back to our camp, about three 
miles [Chippewa], and preparations had not been made for taking 
off the cannon, as it was impossible for me to defend them and make 
preparations for that too, and they were all left on the ground, 
except one beautiful six-pounder, which was presented to my regi- 
ment in testimony of their distinguished gallantry. The ofiicers 
of this army all say, who saw it, that it Avas one of the most 
desperate and gallant acts ever known ; the British ofllcers whom 
we have prisoners say it was the most desperate thing they ever 
saw or heard of. General Brown told me the moment he saw me 
that I had immortalized myself. 'But,' said he, 'my dear fellow, 
my heart ached for you when I gave you that order, but I knew it 
was the only thing that would save us.' " 

Miller had indeed immortalized himself already ; and five years 
later, in the piping times of peace, he resigned his commission in the 
army, an act he regretted as long as he lived, and received the ap- 
pointment of Governor of Arkansas, a place he held for four years. 
He returned to Kew Hampshire, an invalid, in 1823, and received 
the appointment of national collector at Salem and Beverly in Massa- 
chusetts, a post he held for twenty-four years, when he resigned, 
and was succeeded by his youngest son, Avho held it eight years 
longer. He was doubly immortalized in this last period of his life 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 33 

by having Natlianiel Hawtliorne, a subordinate in the custom-house, 
'^ a chiel amang them taking notes " ; and the notices of James 
Miller in the miscellaneous writings of Hawthorne honor the pen 
and heart of the one as much as the life and conduct of the other. 
Miller died 7th July, 1851, and lies buried in Salem. He was a 
Scotch-Irishman indeed, in whom was no guile. 

Londonderry and the towns populated from it have furnished 
ornaments to society all over New England in every walk of life. 
Let me rather say, all over the country, particularly North and 
Middle and West. I will only mention two by name in this con- 
nection, Horace Greeley and George W. Nesmith. Greeley was a 
man known and read of all men. His faults were as open as his 
virtues, and both rested back alike upon a true and rough manhood. 

" Strong-armed as Thor — a shower of fire 
His smitten anvil flung ; 
God's curse, Earth's wrong, dumb Hungei''s ire — 
He gave them all a tongue ! ' ' 

George W. Nesmith died only a month ago, in his ninetieth year, 
and passed his life in the near neighborhood of Daniel Webster's 
birthplace in New Hampshire, both of them graduates of Dartmouth 
College, and the two remarkably intimate with each other till 
Webster's death in 1852, though Nesmith was by much the younger 
man. In the very crisis of the fate of his college, Webster defended 
and emancipated it in the Supreme Court of the United States ; 
perhaps in part from that very reason, so strongly was the younger 
man drawn toward the traditions of the elder. Nesmith flung his 
old age, till the very last, into a supreme effort to sweeten and 
harmonize troubles that have come upon his college, not troubles of 
the same crucial type as struck it in the first quarter of the century, 
but still troubles that impede its usefulness and lessen its prestige. 

I have no list of the governors of New Hampshire from 1775, 
when all direct authority of the British crown was suppressed there, 
and even if I had I could not certainly tell what proportion of them 
have been of Scotch-Irish origin ; but I have been pretty familiar 
with the names of New Hampshire governors for fifty years, and I 
venture in this great presence the historical conjecture, that nearly, 
if not quite, one-half of them from that day to this have been of 
our own strain of blood. 

3. Kenxebec Country. Full as New Hampshire became of 
the Scotch-Irish, especially in the southern and eastern halves of it, 
it is likely that this element became still more predominant in what 



84 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND, 

is now the state of Maine. We have already noted the but half- 
suppressed anxiety of Governor Shute at Boston to get as many as 
possible of the five ship-loads into his province to the eastward, as a 
frontier-barrier against the French and Indians of Canada. Although 
many of the supposed three hundred persons who wintered in the 
harbor of Portland returned the next spring to the Merrimac to 
settle Londonderry, some of them remained in Maine. We know 
certainly, that John Armstrong, Eobert Means, William Jameson, 
Joshua Gray, William Gyles, and a McDonald remained and founded 
families in Portland. James Armstrong, for example, an infant 
son of John, was born in Ireland in 1717, and the parents had a son 
Thomas, born in Portland in 1719. It is pretty certain, also, that 
parts of that company were left on points along Casco Bay and the 
mouth of the Kennebec, at or near Wiscasset, before the main part 
returned to the Merrimac. 

We happen to know with almost absolute certainty the fortunes 
of one of the families left behind in Portland, when the future Lon- 
donderry settlers returned to Massachusetts. This was the family 
of Joshua Gray. He had a Celtic-Irish wife, and a large family. 
The names of the sons of this family were Eeuben, Andrew, James, 
John, Samuel, and Joshua. In the spring of 1759, the year of 
Wolfe's battle on the Heights of Abraham, Governor Pownall, of 
Massachusetts, fitted out an expedition of three hundred and ninety- 
five men in order to capture from the French the mouth of the 
Penobscot River. They left Portland May 4, and arrived at Wasa- 
umkeag Point, May 17. Among the enlisted men were Andrew and 
E-euben Gray. In Governor Pownall's journal may be found the 
following: "May 26. Visited Pentaget with Captain Cargill and 
twenty men. Pound the old abandoned French Fort, and some 
abandoned settlements. Went ashore into the Fort. Hoisted the 
King's Colours there and drank the King's health. Embarked in 
the sloop King George for Boston." 

The place thus described is now known as Castine, from Baron 
Castine, whose name is a very familiar one along the eastern coast 
of Maine ; and among the twenty men who accompanied Governor 
Pownall on that occasion was Reuben Gray. A strong fort was 
planted at Wasaumkeag Point, and the work of building it was 
carried forward so diligently, that it was completed July 5, 1759, 
the expense being five thousand pounds. A garrison was kept there 
until 1775, when the fort was dismantled by Commodore Mowett in 
a British man-of-war, and later in the same year entirely destroyed 
by Colonel Cargill of New Castle. The building of this fort marked 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 35 

the beginning of settlements by the English around the Penobscot 
Bay and River region, the hrst settlers being members of the military 
expedition, who, on being discharged, established themselves near 
the fort, where their homes could have its protection against the 
French and Indians. The two Gray brothers, lleuben and Andrew, 
being of a venturesome disposition, crossed the bay and located at 
what is now called Penobscot, and were the first settlers of English 
origin to build their homes on that historic peninsula. Several 
brothers of Reuben and Andrew followed them to the Penobscot, 
and at last, also, their old father and mother. The distinction is 
claimed for Reuben's son, Reuben Gray, 2d, of being the first male 
child of English parentage born east of the Penobscot River, the 
date of his birth being 1762. The old father, Joshua, died about 
the opening of the Revolution, but the Irish widow continued until 
after the close of the war. The first Reuben seems to have died 
about 1820, and the second certainly in 1858 ; and about ten years 
ago, as my two oldest boys, with other students of Williams College, 
were making sailing excursions along the coast of Maine, they ran 
across, at Brooksville, within the mouth of the Penobscot, Captain 
Abner Gray, son of the second Reuben, then nearly eighty-five, as 
straight as an arrow, helpful and hospitable ; and that chance 
acquaintance led to the correspondence that has given us these facts 
about the Scotch-Irish on the Penobscot. The Grays of this very 
family are still in large numbers in Brooksville and Bucksport, on 
the lower Penobscot ; and so are Wears, and Orrs, and Doaks, and 
other Scotch-Irish families. 

In published extracts from court records of the Province of 
Maine I have read the affidavits of several of the early inhabitants, 
who stated that they came to Boston in August, 1718, from Ulster, 
and thence that autumn to Maine, where they settled in Bruns- 
wick and that neighborhood; which is another independent evi- 
dence that parts of our now famous five ship-loads furnished the 
first Scotch-Irish settlers of Maine, as well as of Kew Hampshire 
and Massachusetts. 

The next attempt to introduce this class of immigrants into 
Maine seems to have been from a source entirely independent of the 
previous one, though nearly contemporaneous with it. Robert Tem- 
ple, who had been an officer in the English army, and was a gentle- 
man of family, was a leader in the enterprise. His motive was to 
establish himself as a large landed proprietor in this country. He 
says in a letter to the Plymouth proprietors : " In September, 1717, 
I contracted with Captain James Luzmore, of Topsham, to bring 



36 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

me, my servants, and what little effects I had to Boston." "My 
eye," he continues, " was always toward a good tract of land as -veil 
as a convenient place for navigation." Returning from an examina- 
tion of Connecticut, he says: "I was resolved to see the eastern 
country also before I should determine where to begin my settle- 
ment." The proprietors of the west banks of the Kennebec took 
him down to see their land ; but he gave the ultimate preference to 
land on the east side of the river, which belonged to Colonel Hutch- 
inson and the Plymouth Company, and he became a partner in that 
concern and engaged to bring a colony to it. Within two years he 
chartered five large ships to bring over families from Ulster to carry 
on the settlement. They were the same sort of people that came to 
Boston, and from the same general localities. During the two years, 
1719 and 1720, several hundred families were landed on the shores 
of the Kennebec from its mouth to Merry meeting Bay. Many of 
the families settled in what is now Topsham, which received its 
name from Temple's place of departure on his first voyage, the port 
of Exeter in Devonshire ; another portion settled in the northerly 
part of Bath, on a tract of land stretching along on Merrymeeting 
Bay to the Androscoggin, and was called Cork, and sometimes Ire- 
land, from the country of the settlers, which name it still retains ; 
and still others straggled along on the eastern side of the bay and 
river, and descendants of these still occupy and improve portions of 
the country. The familiar Scotch names, McFadden, McGowen, 
McCoun, Vincent, Hamilton, Johnston, Malcolm, McClellan, Craw- 
ford, Graves, Ward, Giveu, Dunning, Simpson, still live to remind 
the present generation of the land from which their ancestors came. 
Unhappily, the Indian troubles, which we call " Lovell's War," 
commenced shortly after Temple's people got fairly seated on the 
Kennebec, broke up some of the settlements, which had begun to 
assume a flourishing aspect, and scattered away many colonists from 
the rest ; some of these sought a refuge with their countrymen at 
Londonderry, N. H., but the greatest part of them removed to Penn- 
sylvania ; Brunswick and Georgetown were destroyed and deserted ; 
in the summer of 1722, nine families were captured at one time by 
the Indians in Merrymeeting Bay; but Temple himself and many 
of his people remained, and the descendants of both have connected 
their names indissolubly with Bowdoin College in Brunswick, and 
with both state and church in Maine. Temple himself received a 
military commission from Governor Shute, and rendered good service 
in the defense of his adopted country. His posterity have served it 
long and well. His eldest son, Robert, married a daughter of Gov- 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 37 

ernor Shirley ; the second son, John, lived to become a baronet, and 
married a daughter of Governor Bowdoin, of Massachusetts. Their 
daughter, Elizabeth, married Thomas D. Winthrop, of Massachusetts, 
and those are the parents of Robert C. Winthrop, of Boston. 

After the breaking up of the Norridgewock tribe on the Upper 
Kennebec, some of Temple's Scotch settlers returned to the deserted 
places on the eastern shore, and new adventurers sought the vacant 
seats. In 1729, Colonel Dunbar, a native of Ireland, of Scottish 
descent, in the hope of separating Maine from the Massachusetts 
government, obtained a commission from the crown as governor of 
the territory. He had previously been commissioned as surveyor- 
general of the woods, with a view to preserve the pine timber for 
the British navy. He selected Fort Frederick, at Pemaquid, as the 
seat of his government, and was placed in possession by a detach- 
ment of troops from Nova Scotia, in 1730. Rightful were the claims 
of Massachusetts to the eastern shore ; but Dunbar took immediate 
measures to occupy and improve the lands in his new province by 
inviting his countrymen, the Scotch-Irish, to settle upon them 
through liberal inducements both of lands and privileges. He 
granted one-hundred-acre lots on Pemaquid in the neighborhood of 
the fort, laid out and improved a large farm for himself, and ceded 
to his countrymen, Montgomery and Campbell and McCobb, large 
tracts, which soon became towns. In the course of two or three 
years, more than one hundred and fifty families, principally of 
Scotch descent, were introduced into this territory. Some were 
drawn from the older settlements of the stock in Massachusetts and 
New Hampshire, and some were fresh colonists from Ireland. These 
had their pastor. Rev. Robert Rutherford, and their Presbyterian 
institutions, which they cherished with great tenacity for a long 
time. Among these families were McClintocks, Hustons, McLeans, 
McKeens, Caldwells, Dicks, Forbushes, Browns, Mclntyres, and 
McFarlands. 

Massachusetts continued to protest against the government of 
Dunbar, excellent as were its results, and .it was terminated in 
August, 1732, and jurisdiction restored to Massachusetts. Dunbar 
returned to England in 1737, where, like Penn, he was committed to 
prison for debt, but afterward released through the liberality of his 
friends, and in 1743 was appointed governor of St. Helena, an Eng- 
lish island since rendered famous by the exile of a more distinguished 
ruler than this early Scotch-Irish governor of Maine. 

Samuel Waldo, who had been a sort of agent of Massachusetts in 
displacing Dunbar, and who had an interest in the territory as a 



38 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

patentee, and who had seen the benefit arising from the admirable 
class of immigrants whom Dunbar had introduced, proceeded to 
profit by the example in respect to his own ample possessions lying 
between the St. George and the Penobscot rivers. In 1734, Waldo 
carefully examined the resources of his land grant, and fortunately 
discovered the invaluable quarries of limestone, which have proven 
from that day to this day a source of continued riches and progress 
to the inhabitants of that peninsula. The first movements in the 
manufacture of lime there, which are now so extended, and which 
seem at present to claim the attention of our legislators at Washing- 
ton, was so small that the lime was shipped to Boston in molasses 
casks. The St. George Eiver, on which the first settlements were 
made, is a plunging stream, and afforded then and now fine mill 
sites for handling both wood and stone, and the near forests gave an 
abundant supply of timber. 

Waldo's first settlers upon his eastern grant were all of Scotch 
descent from the North of Ireland — some of them of recent immi- 
gration, and others had been in the country from the first arrival in 
Boston in 1718. The company consisted of twenty-seven families, 
arrived upon the spot in 1735, and each family furnished with one 
hundred acres of land on the banks of the St. George, in the present 
town of Warren, Maine. The names of some of these pioneers will 
show to those familiar with the history of Maine how much the 
state is indebted to this enterprising proprietor, Samuel Waldo, for 
placing in permanent contact with the soil these most useful settlers. 
Among the names are Alexander, Blair, Kilpatrick, North, Patterson, 
Nelson, Starrett, Howard, McLean, Spear, Creighton, McCracken, 
and Morrison. The Old Prench War broke out in 1744, which 
greatly interrupted developments in Maine for ten years, when 
Waldo went to Scotland again, and formed a company of sixty 
adults and many children, who reached St. George's river in Sep- 
tember, 1753, and were settled in the western part of Warren, to 
which they gave the name of Stirling, the ancient royal city of their 
country. These were mostly mechanics ; the names of some of 
them were Anderson, Malcolm, Crawford, Miller, Auchmutey, Cars- 
well, and Johnston ; and this we believe to be the last immigration 
into New England of people of Scottish extraction, in any consider- 
able number, prior to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. 

Prom these three centers of diffusion, now briefly indicated — 
Worcester, Londonderry, Wiscasset — the Scotch-Irish element pen- 
etrated and permeated all parts of New England : Maine the most 
of all, New Hampshire next, then Massachusetts, and then in les- 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 39 

sening order Vermont and Connecticut and Kliode Island. Tliey 
were all in general one sort of people. They belonged to one grade 
and sphere of life. They were for the most part very poor in this 
world's goods. The vast majority of all the adults, however, could 
read and write. If they had but one book to a family, that book 
was surely the Bible, which is itself, as we sometimes forget, a large 
collection of books of very varied character ; and if there were two 
volumes to a family, the second place in most cases was disputed 
between Fox's " Book of Martyrs " and Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress." Their personal habits, their mental characteristics, their 
religious beliefs and experiences, and their very superstitions, were 
held largely in common ; and all these were in more or less pro- 
nounced contrast with corresponding traits of the English Puritans 
who had nestled before them in most parts of New England. 

So far as their physical natures went, they had received in the 
old country a splendid outfit for the race of life, in large bones and 
strong teeth, and a digestive apparatus the envy of the mountain 
bears. Men and women both were trained to an almost tireless 
physical industry. The struggle for physical subsistence had been 
with them no mere figure of speech. First of European countries, 
the potato had been found by Ireland, to which it had been brought 
from Virginia by slave-trader Hawkins in 1565, an invaluable re- 
source of food for the poor ; and each and every company of 
Scotch-Irish brought with them to New England, as a part of the 
indispensable outfit, some tubers of this esculent, which they prized 
beyond price. The pine lands of New England, wiiich are always 
sandy, are adapted to the potato ; and if there were no sulfering 
from hunger in those large families during the first years of their 
sojourn, it should doubtless be put to the credit of the easily- 
cultivated, much-multiplying Irish potato ! 

Each and every company of these people brought also with them 
into New England the agricultural implements needful for the cul- 
ture of the flax-plant, and the small wheels for spinning the flax-fiber, 
and the looms for weaving the linen textures. Nothing connected 
with the newcomers excited so much interest in English and Puritan 
Boston, in 1718, and the three following years, as the small wheels 
worked by women and propelled by the foot, for turning the straight 
flax-fibers into thread. There was a public exhibition of their skill 
in spinning flax, by the Scotch-Irish women, on Boston Common in 
the spring of 1719, at which prizes were awarded to the foremost. 
Drake's "Boston" gives an account of the sensation produced by 
the advent of this strange machine there, ^nd of societies and schools 



40 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

formed to teach the art of thus making linen thread. For four 
years the novelty exercised its fascination, and the first ladies of 
the town paraded on the Common to exhibit their newly-learned art, 
derived from their stalwart sisters from over the sea. It is not 
historically set down in the records in so many words, but at this 
safe distance, and (as it were) under the protection of the guns of 
Fort Duquesne, we may venture the assertion, that the Boston girls 
were hard to beat in their newly-found and most useful avocation ! 

It is time now to conclude this paper, perhaps too long already, 
with some brief points of reference to common traits among them, 
to characteristics, some good, some bad, but very few indifferent! 
It is perfectly plain at every point of their settlement alongside the 
previous English Puritan, that they pretty soon excited prejudice 
against themselves, sometimes disgust, and sometimes even hate. 
The natural result of this was to throw them more and more upon 
each other in intermarriage, in a community of residence and of 
interest and of feeling; so that they did not coalesce very readily 
with other strains of blood and with other sects of Christians, so 
that they tended to keep up acquaintance in families from genera- 
tion to generation, even when separated locally ; and, consequently, 
the very traits themselves, the peculiarities, tended to preserve and 
perpetuate themselves for the ends of a later critical study and record. 

a. In the first place, what is the contemporary testimony of tlie 
senses of those who came into personal contact with our Scotch-Irish 
ancestors who settled New England? The late Mr. Jewell, of 
Hartford, Conn., who was a tanher by trade, was sent by his country 
as a minister plenipotentiary to the court of St. Petersburg ; being 
a Yankee, and " wanting to know you know," and being a tanner in 
possession of most of the profitable secrets of his guild, he went to 
Russia determined to avail himself of all his ofiicial and personal 
chances to find out the chemical composition and proportions of the 
tanning materials that give the peculiar odor and character to what 
is called " Russia leather " ; but this was a national secret exceed- 
ingl}^ profitable to the Muscovites ; genial and precious as was dear 
Mr. Jewell, they would tell him nothing, but they would show him 
everything — were not Russia and the United States traditional and 
everlasting friends ? Mr. Jewell told us himself on his return that 
he literally "followed his nose" in those Russian leather establish- 
ments ; what he learned in this way he did not impart except to his 
partners, but he rightly considered the process to be one of induc- 
tive reasoning, the results of which were scientific and satisfactory 
to himself and his friends ; in one word, that logical inferences may 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 41 

be drawn from the sense of smell as well as from the other senses, 
and that he was not shut up to " ocular demonstration," so far as 
the immemorial processes of tanning skins are concerned. 

It is indisputable that the contemporaries of our Scotch-Irish 
ancestors in New England satisfied themselves by analogous trains 
of reasoning and conclusion that, in their new neighbors' scale of 
the virtues, personal cleanliness was put way down far below god- 
liness ! They began with a devout care of the spirit, and life was 
really not long enough for them to fetch round to a decent care of 
the flesh ! Wash-bowl and pitcher was no part of the common set- 
out of the newly-married pair. In the more progressive families an 
iron skillet in the kitchen sink opened up a chance for parents and 
children to wash their hands and faces in the morning, a chance, I 
take it, that rarely hardened itself into a rule for either. Ablution 
of the whole body even once a year, or ten years, or a life-time, was 
a thing practically unknown for three generations of our ancestral 
fathers and mothers. Tertium quid ? This matter had ill conse- 
quences, of course, in diseases and mortality of children ; in a disgust 
felt for uncleanly old people ; in an intolerable stench arising from 
crowded religious assemblies, often prolonged for hours and hours ; 
and in a prejudice and mockery on the part of neighbors trained in 
and accustomed to more cleanly personal habits. 

For two or three generations, at least, ordinary houses were not 
provided with ordinaries of any kind ; barns and pig-pens were in 
close proximity to the houses, and the two were scarcely. discrimi- 
nated from each other; the methods of farming were to the last 
degree uncleanly and unwholesome and disgusting — this is partic- 
ularly noted in regard to Londonderry and its neighborhood, and I 
know that it was true in relation to Worcester. Their company 
was more or less avoided by the English on this account, and their 
rights doubtless less respected ; the intermarriages that took place 
for two generations were for the most part with the lowest and 
poorest of the low and poor English; and with the major part 
of this class of people in New England the steps upward to the 
daily bath and the decent water-closet have been unreasonably slow 
and interrupted. 

b. In the second place, it must be frankly admitted, that the 
dread of water in another sense of that term greatly harmed our 
folks for the first century of their residence in this land. They dis- 
criminated against water, in their estimate of beverages. Account 
for it as we may, high latitude, Celtic restlessness, strenuous poverty, 
aspiration above realization,, cheap whisky, what not, the Scotch of 



42 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

whatever origin and whatever residence grasp and hold too much 
stimulus per capita of the population. It was always so. It is so 
now. It is not because they are canny, and it is not because they 
are Presbyterians. / do not know the reason tvhy. If there be one 
man in this vast assemblage that knows the reason and will tell it 
straight, he will immortalize himself like James Miller, and this 
four days' meeting in this year of grace will need no other memo- 
rial till the end of time ! 

When Londonderry was incorporated in the name of George III., 
June, 1722, the charter enacted " that on every Wednesday of the 
week forever they may hold, keep, and enjoy a market for the buy- 
ing and selling of goods, wares, and merchandise, and various kinds 
of ereatures, endowed with the usual privileges, profits, and immu- 
nities, as other market towns fully hold, possess, and enjoy ; and two 
Fairs annually forever, the first to be held and kept within the said 
town on the 8th day of November next, and so annually forever, and 
the other on the 8th day of May in like manner. Provided, if it 
should so happen, that at any time either of these days fall on the 
Lord's day, then the said Fair shall be held and kept the day follow- 
ing it. The said Fair shall have, hold, and enjoy the liberties, priv- 
ileges, and immunities as other Fairs in other towns fully possess, 
hold, and enjoy." 

For more than one hundred years these semi-annual fairs were 
maintained without a break. Their original design was good; 
namely, to afford opportunity to people of neighboring towns to 
meet and exchange their commodities with each other for a mutual 
profit — and we will just note in passing that the Scotch-Irish of 
that day had not made the grand modern discovery that exchange 
of commodities is a crime to be prevented by the exercise of all the 
powers of the United States government. The assemblages at these 
fairs were usually large ; merchants from Haverhill and Salem and 
Boston were present with their goods, and every variety of home 
growths and manufactures was collected for exchange. Everything 
at first was conducted with a decent order and propriety, although 
the fair was always held in and around the only tavern of the town, 
and there was always much drinking over the bar and some intoxi- 
cation. As time went on and as stores became multiplied in the 
towns, and as means of communication improved, the benefits of 
these fairs and the grounds for their maintenance diminished, and 
the obvious evils increased, until they proved a moral nuisance, 
attracting chiefly the more corrupt portion of the community, and 
exhibiting each year for successive days scenes of vice and folly in 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 43 

some of their worst forms. Serious attempts were made from time 
to time by the town to mitigate these evils, but with little success. 
In 1798 the following vote was passed at the annual town-meeting : 
" From the misconduct and disorderly behavior of most of the people 
which frequent the fair, as now holdeu, the good intention and 
original design are altogether defeated, it is hereupon enacted, that 
it shall be confined to two days — one day each spring and fall; 
voted also, that no booth shall be used after 9 o'clock in the evening 
of said days, for selling merchandise or liquor, or furnishing any 
kind of entertainment, without forfeiting and paying a fine of one 
pound." And at last the final suppression of the fair was brought 
about in 1839, as the result of the temperance reformation in Lon- 
donderry, for when the bar was removed from the tavern and no 
intoxicating drinks were to be had in the place, the crowds assem- 
bled as usual, but at once withdrew. 

Many of the social customs of our fathers indicate also a fond- 
ness for strong drink, which not even their iron constitutions and 
out-of-door life, and in the main, approving consciences, could pre- 
vent from demoralizing them. This love of liquor was a national 
trait. The direct evidence we have on this point relates more 
particularly to Londonderry and its resulting towns, but there are 
lines of proof that converge upon the same point in relation to 
Worcester and its sequels, and to the Kennebec and Penobscot towns 
as well. It is true that, owing to the difference in their language 
and habits and modes of life from those of their English neighbors, 
prejudices against these settlers were early imbibed and unreason- 
ably indulged, and many things in their manners and practices were 
grossly exaggerated at the time and falsely reported and believed ; 
we must bear all this in mind in weighing the evidence, but the 
traditions that have come down in certain families from generation 
to generation, with some of which I became very familiar from 
childhood to manhood, as well as the written record in all its varied 
forms, can leave no doubt on the minds of their candid descendants 
that here was a crevasse in the generally solid character of their 
moral build-up. They found or made occasion in their marriage 
ceremonies, in their wakes or watchings with the dead, and in their 
funeral solemnities, to partake of ardent spirits with such freedom 
and frequency as were often productive of most painful scenes and 
serious consequences. 

The wedding, for example, was in substance a sumptuous feast. 
The invitations were given out at least three days before the time, 
it being considered an affront to receive one only one day previous. 



44 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

At the appointed hour the groom proceeded from his dwelling with 
his select friends, male and female ; about half way on their journey- 
to the house of the bride, they were met by the bride's select male 
friends ; and, on meeting, each of the two companies made choice of 
one of their number " to run for the bottle " to the bride's house. 
The champion of the race who reached the well-filled bottle first, 
and returned with it, gave a toast, drank to the bridegroom's health, 
and having passed the bottle fully round, the united company pro- 
ceeded to the residence of the bride. When arrived there, the 
religious and other services did not differ essentially from those 
common now at domestic weddings ; but the ceremony being con- 
cluded, the whole company sat down to the entertainment, at which 
the "best man" and "best maid" presided. Then the room was 
cleared for dances and other amusements ; the " flow " was kept up, 
and the " floor " was kept cleared ; and an aged narrator, about the 
beginning of this century, kindling at the recollection of scenes then 
for him all gone by, concluded his account of the ancient wedding, 
" and the evening was spent with a degree of pleasure of which our 
modern fashionables are perfectly ignorant ! " 

When death entered a Scotch-Irish community in the olden time 
in New England, and one anywise prominent was removed, there 
was at once a cessation of all labor in the neighborhood. The people 
gathered at the house of mourning, and proceeded night after night 
to observe a custom which they had brought with them from Ireland 
(whether it be more Irish than Scottish, if there is any difference 
of meaning between these epithets in this connection, it were vain 
to speculate) called the " wake," or watching with the dead, until 
the interment had taken place. These night scenes, as at the 
present time wherever kept up, often exhibited a mixture of serious- 
ness and frivolity, of religion and deviltry, to the last degree gro- 
tesque and incompatible. The Scriptures would be solemnly read, 
long prayers would be offered, and words of counsel and admonition 
administered to the mourning circle ; but before long, according to 
established usage, the glass, with its exhilarating and intoxicating 
beverage, must circulate freely and repeatedly ; so that, before the 
dawn, the joke and the laugh, if not scenes more boisterous and 
bewildering, would break in upon the slumbers of the dead. 

The assemblage was sure to be large in all the Scotch-Irish settle- 
ments, whatever might have been the age or character or worldly 
condition of the party deceased, at the funeral services. Every 
relative, however distant the connection, must surely be present, or 
it would be regarded as a marked neglect ; and it was expected also 



SCOTCH-IEISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 45 

that all tlie friends and acquaintance of the deceased Avithin a 
reasonable distance of the home would be in attendance. Funeral 
sermons were rarely or never delivered upon the occasion, yet there 
would usually be as large a congregation as assembled on the Sab- 
bath, Previous to the prayer ardent spirit was always handed 
round, not only to the mourners and bearers, but also to the entire 
assembly. Again after prayer, and before the coffin Avas removed, 
the same thing was repeated. Nearly all would follow the body to 
the grave, and usually the greater number walked. Processions 
from a third to one-half a mile in length were not infrequent in 
Londonderry at the burial of an ordinary citizen. On their return 
to the house, the demoralizing draught was again administered to 
all, and a further edible entertainment provided. Many a poor 
family became embarrassed, if not absolutely impoverished, in con- 
sequence of the heavy expenses incurred, not so much by the sick- 
ness which preceded the death of one of its members, as by the 
funeral ceremonies as then and there observed, required, as they 
foolishly supposed, by respect for the dead. 

c. In the third place, it was a pleasing and remarkable trait of 
these people, that they knew how to put things in a humorous and 
witty and even sarcastic dress. It was natural to them. They 
could do it well, and therefore they liked to do it. They were mar- 
velously quick at repartee. Of course their brogue was a great lielji 
to them here, because it intensified the sense of incongruity, which 
seems to be of the essence of merriment. Subjectively they relished 
the sense of the grotesque and incongruous, and objectively their 
art and their brogue helped them to magnify it. Pev. Dr. Morrison 
once delivered an election sermon before the New Hampshire legis- 
lature, Avhich proved incisive and effective ; the body voted to print 
a specified number of copies, when a witty member (appreciating 
this point) moved to substitute an additional number, "provided 
they would also print the brogue." 

The ministers were particularly skilled as between each other in 
humorous attack and retort. It was the one chief relief from the 
soberness and intensity of their lives. Por example, two of these 
clergymen were walking along together on an icy road. Suddenly 
one of them slipped, and fell flat. Pev. Upright eyed his brother 
for a moment solemnly, and quoted : " The wicked stand in slippery 
places." Instantly retorted Pev. Prostrate, "I see they do, but I 
can't." William Stinson, born in Ireland, came to Londonderry with 
his father while still very young. Thence he migrated to Dunbar- 
ton, N. H., where he lived alone in his log-house, destitute of most 



46 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

of the conveniences of domestic life, and laid there and thus the 
foundations of a large fortune for the time. Eev. David McGregor, 
of Londonderry, called on him there (they had been boys together), 
and dined with him. Not having a table, or anything that would 
answer for a better substitute, Brother Stinson was obliged to make 
use of a bushel basket placed bottom-side upward. Both were grate- 
ful beforehand for the frugal meal frugally served, and Rev, Mr. 
McGregor, being asked, of course, to solicit the divine blessing, 
pertinently and devoutly implored that his host might be blessed 
''in his basket and his store." This was literally verified in the 
time to come ! 

Kev. Matthew Clark, who carried to his grave an unhealed wound 
from a sword-cut received in the siege of Derry, was accustomed, 
even to old age, and even in the pulpit, to quick and witty turns, 
which we must suppose were very effective. At any rate, they are 
very interesting to us, accustomed as we are, more or less, to dull 
preaching. The old cavalry captain with the black patch over his 
eye-brow was preaching one day on the over-confidence of Peter, that 
he would never deny his Lord, and his subsequent humiliating fall, 
and remarked : " Just like Peter, aye mair forrit than wise, ganging 
swaggering about wi' a sword at his side ; an' a puir han' he mad' o' 
it when he cam' to the trial, for he only cut off a chiel's lug, an' he 
ought to ha' split down his head ! " 

This same old warrior of God is said also to have commenced a 
discourse from Philippians 4, 13, in the following startling manner : 
" ' I can do all things.' Ay, can ye, Paul ? I'll bet ye a dollar o^ 
that (placing a Spanish milled dollar upon the desk). Stop! let's 
see what else Paul says : ' I can do all things through Christ, which 
strengthened me.' Ay, sae can I, Paul ; I draw my bet," and he 
thereupon returned the dollar to his pocket ! 

This gift of enlivening humor, so common and so much cultivated 
among them, afforded a much-needed relief to their isolated lives 
upon their slovenly -kept farms, and afforded a relief also to their 
usually downright and dogmatic expression of their opinions. They 
were open and above-board in all their opinions and in all their talk. 
They did not back-bite with their tongues. There was biting, a 
plenty of it, but it was in a forward movement, fronting the oppo- 
nent, whoever he was. Subterraneanism was something these people 
abhorred. If any one had a ground of complaint against another, 
or, what was much the same thing, if he supposed he had, his method 
of procedure was not like that of besieging castles in the Middle 
Ages, by gradual approaches, but, on the contrary, was exceedingly 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 47 

direct and personal. The party of the second part was pretty sure 
to be the first one to hear of the grievance, and of the quick feelings 
excited by it. They seemed to like to fight their own battles directly, 
and rarely enlisted substitutes ! They were a pugnacious people 
among themselves, these Scotch-Irish. Their views were mostly 
definite, and sharpened to a point. There was a wholesome breezi- 
ness among them that is refreshing to look back upon. They were 
fond of regarding the Christian course under St. Paul's favorite 
figure of a warfare ; whatever else they failed to do, they meant to 
fight a good fight, and to keep the faith once delivered to them — 
the present saints. But in all this their ever-present sense of humor, 
and their ability to bring it to bear in extremities, was not only a 
relief to their pig-headed dogmatism, but was also a constant restraint 
and antidote to it. 

And yet, what seems at first blush to be incompatible with what 
has just been said, it was a very common trait of these peculiar 
people to maintain a soi't of secrecy or clandestinism in matters 
neutral to religion and politics, in matters personal and indifferent, 
that stood in strange contrast to their utter frankness and unreserve 
in those things which they deemed cardinal. They seem to have 
caught beforehand, and to have practiced from generation to genera- 
tion, the spirit of Burns's strain : 

" Conceal yersel' as weel's you can 
Frae critical dissection ; 
But keek through every ither man 
Wi' sharpened sly inspection ! 

"Ay free, aff han' yoiu- story tell, 
When wi' a bosom crony ; 
But still keep something to yersel' 
Ye' 11 scarcely say to ony ! " 

Somewhere in the neighborhood of these two traits, which seem 
themselves to be the opposites of each other, there lay another char- 
acteristic of this tribe, what might almost be called in Bacon's phrase 
an idol of the tribe, — a persistent capacity to hold a grudge ! I will 
not philosophize upon this, though I am certain of it as a fact. To 
forgive and forget an injury, real or supposed, a grace hard enough 
of attainment for any Christian anywhere, God knows, and we know, 
was especially hard for these half-Celtic and half-Saxon believers in 
and imitators of the blessed Lord. We need to make no reference 
here to the old historic feuds. Highland or Lowland — we are not 
sure as that would have any relevancy; but any analysis of the 



48 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

character of the New England Scotch-Irish, however cursory, in con- 
trast with the English Puritans alongside of whom they lived and 
labored, would be faulty and out of the true, that did not call a pass- 
ing attention to a characteristic of them, both men and women — a 
characteristic which has come down within the observation of those 
still living — a tendency to hold together and re-knit at intervals 
the strong fibers of a grudge, a prejudice, a misconception ; fibers 
late and last to be fused in the blessed fires of Christian discipline 
and holy love ! 

d. And this brings us, in the fourth place, to some peculiarities 
in the religious conceptions and experience of these good people 
which may jirove instructive and illuminating to us to whom these 
ends of the world have come. John Knox had adjusted for their 
simple eye-siglit all the glasses in the long tube, pointed for them 
toward Geneva and John Calvin, whenever they wished to take 
their bearings from the east, and to renew the grounds and the pro- 
portions of the famous Five Points ; and, at one and the same time, 
perform the impossible task so often undertaken to no purpose, to 
conform their lives in simple faith and love to the still, small voice, 
and to settle themselves theologically four-square and impregnable. 
Of course there was something grotesque in this attempted combina- 
tion, and of course there was something sublime in it. John Calvin 
was only twenty-six years old when he wrote or sketched his famous 
"Institutes of Theology." Oh ! that he had waited twenty-five years 
longer, and learned, as he certainly would have done, that men are 
made in the image of God in other respects also, as well as in a 
tendency to an inflexible logic-handling of data imperfectly under- 
stood ! This would have saved our morbidly conscientious ancestors 
from much that appears to us insane and ridiculous ; and, let it be 
confessed, would have prevented them also from undertaking much 
that proved great and enduring. 

The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of New England were in bondage 
to the "letter," and the "Emancipation Proclamation" has not even 
yet been read and pondered and joyfully accepted by many of their 
descendants. Contrary to the doctrine of St. Paul, who was and is 
the evangelist of the whole circle, they " served in the oldness of the 
letter and not in the newness of the spirit." They did not find out 
what this meaneth even from the lips of their own preferred teacher 
— " the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life." There was accord- 
ingly, a hardness and a formality in their religious lives and actions, 
in striking contrast with the relative freedom and love and spirit of 
the best Christians of our own times, who may themselves have come 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 49 

out from the rigid lines and mailed loins of these saints and soldiers 
of the Middle Age. 

The cases of church discipline, many of which have come down to 
us by way of record, turned for the most part not on the absence of 
brotherly love and the spirit of mutual helpfulness, which are of the 
essence of Christianity, but on some miserable technicality, some 
formal violation of an external rite or usage of the church. For 
example, the Thursday before communion was a fast day, and kept 
with all the rigidity and punctilio of a Jewish Sabbath. A complaint 
was brought against a member of the church of Londonderry, for 
spreading out grain to dry on such a Thursday — the grain was 
ready to spoil for lack of the sun shining in his strength — and he 
was duly and solemnly admonished by the session. In 1734, we find 
a complaint against John Morrison, brought by Archibald Stark, that 
the former, having found an axe in the road, " did not leave it at the 
next tavern as the laws of the country doth require " ; and though 
Morrison acknowledged the fact, and plead that the axe was of so 
small value that it would not quit the costs of legally proclaiming 
it, yet he was severely censured by the session, "and exhorted to 
repent of the evil." 

The cheap metallic pieces, called " tokens," which entitled the 
bearer without question to the privileges of the Lord's Supper, came 
to have a factitious and even superstitious value set upon them by 
the holders, as if St. Peter himself, at the gate of heaven, must 
instantly recognize the validity of those dirty bits of brass stamped 
with the initials of the church. Amid so much that was outer and 
formal and Jewish and rectangular, there is of necessity lacking the 
sweeter and gentler virtues, the noiseless charity, the reaching out 
to one another the hands which are felt, not seen. All the rain 
from heaven seemed to come in great showers in the day-time, and 
there was less of the refreshing and universal dew, the gift of the 
night, found often on the under-side of the blade and the leaf and 
the flower. 

The bolder and sterner virtues of the Christian character were 
those present — the vigilance of the watchman on the walls of Zion, 
the valor of the desperate onset summoned by the trumpet of Jeho- 
vah, the tirelessness of the strong reaper in the hot harvest-field, the 
dying cry of the born general, sleepless and intent, " Tete d'armee ! " 
But alas ! for the onesidedness of the best human life ; alas ! for the 
temptation that lurks the nearest to the noblest virtue ; alas ! for 
the exhibition of what is devilish in apparently vital connection 
with what is divine. So here. Our fathers were heresy-hunters. 



50 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

They revered a shibboleth. They only could guard aright the ark 
of God. They thought themselves to be vicegerents. They fell 
into the sin of condemning their brethren, for whom Christ died. 

"The Truth's worst foe is he who claims 
To act as God's avenger ; 
And dreams beyond his sentiy beat 
The crystal walls in danger ! 

" Who sets for heresy his traps 
Of verbal quirk and quibble ; 
And weeds the Garden of the Lord 
With Satan's borrowed dibble." 

I may be wrong in this, but it is my deliberate judgment, that 
the English Pilgrims of the Old Colony and their descendants, and 
the original Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay and their children, 
fallible and narrow and one-sided and bigoted and uncharitable as 
they all were, nevertheless represented on the whole, in an age 
equally adverse to them all, a sweeter and better and truer spirit in 
their lives than the more highly organized and more historically 
connected Christians whose blessed memories we strive to keep 
alive to-day. 

However this may be, one thing is certain. New England has 
proved to the last degree inhospitable to PresbyteriaHism as a form 
of church administration. Established over and over again in Maine, 
in New Hampshire, and in fewer numbers in Massachusetts, renewed 
over and over again when decayed and moribund, the presbyteries 
have run one steady and inevitable course toward extinction. There 
is one nominal presbytery in New England to-day doing duty only 
on the official records of the church, denominated " Boston," but it 
was utterly unrepresented in the General Assembly last week at 
Saratoga. It has a name to live, but it is dead. 

Something corresponding with what the evolutionists style " en- 
vironment " must be the explanation of this most striking and reit- 
erated phenomenon. What is there in New England that is so fatal 
to the Presbyterian form? A good word is oftentimes a harbor of 
refuge to the perplexed and baffled inquirer. Presbyterianism came 
to us early ; it came strong ; it reinforced itself from tinje to time 
with new and large recruits, but it could not root in Yankee land. 
What has been the matter ? I answer, environment, whatever that 
may mean. The Plymouth people, from 1620 and onward, were 
obliged to take to independence in church government, whether they 
willed or nilled ; ten years later and onward, John Winthrop and 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 51 

his learned ministers in Charlestown, Cambridge, and Boston, drank 
in from the salt marshes and Massachusetts Bay long whiffs of what 
afterward came to be called Congregationalism; Roger Williams 
inhaled the same sort of air in Salem, and liked the oxygen of it, 
and carried it in stout lungs to Providence, to become the breath of 
life to the Baptists, a vast congeries of independent churches ; the 
molds got set in New England ; self-governed churches took the bits 
in their teeth one by one ; and when, in 1718, the Presbyterians 
came to Boston, and triangulated themselves at Worcester, London- 
derry, and Wiscasset, they established their own forms at the two 
latter places without let or hindrance, but the opposition at Worces- 
ter was significant ; and the whole trend and drift of things — in 
short, the environment — was and has continued such, that, proud 
of their fathers of every name, and thankfully accepting the tribute 
from every land, New England people believe in and will uphold the 
independent government of their churches, each for and by itself.. 

e. In the last place, we must note the social and political tenden- 
cies and peculiarities of the Scotch-Irish in New England. It is 
here that the main lesson comes in. It is here that their impress 
has been deepest and best. It is along this line that we can clearly 
trace their footsteps from the first, and see their lasting influence to 
this day. There is no careful investigation but brings its surprises. 
There is no genuine study of aggregate men whose results do not 
display apparent contradictions at some point. It is so with our 
folks. They were zealous Presbyterians, and that system implies 
authority and subordination ; the simple church member is under 
the direction of the session to an extent unknown in independent 
churches ; the session is a part of the presbytery, and is controlled 
by it ; and all the presbyteries are under the legislative domination 
of the general assembly. The system involves, therefore, higher 
and lower in church authority ; it involves rank in a certain sense, 
and it would not seem to be favorable to individualism in rights and 
power. Each intermediate grade, like the centurion in the Gospel, 
says : '' I also am a man under authority, having soldiers under me." 

We should expect beforehand, accordingly, that these people 
would be no great sticklers for individual rights in politics, and no 
very sharp opponents of that insidious privilege, which is all the 
while stealing a march on the rights of the masses, and creating by 
law or usage privileged classes, lower and higher, polite plunderers, 
and perhaps unconscious plundered. Sir Thomas More wrote of the 
England of his time, and it is just as true of the United States in 
each and every decade of the first century of the constitution : " The 



52 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

rich are ever striving to pare away something further from the daily 
wages of the poor by private fraud, and even by public law, so that 
the wrong already existing, for it is a wrong that those from whom 
the state derives most benefit should receive the least reward, is 
made yet greater by means of the law of the state. The rich devise 
every means by which they may in the first place secure to them- 
selves what they have amassed by wrong, and then take to their 
own use and profit, at the lowest possible price, the work and labor 
of the poor. And so soon as the rich decide on adopting these 
devices in the name of the public, then they become law." 

On the contrary, rather in contrast with the Puritans, who, speak- 
ing generally, seem to have felt no repugnance to distinctions and 
privileges for themselves and their own, either in church or state, 
these Scotch-Irish citizens, as a rule, manifested a working instinct, 
if not a trained principle, favorable to equality of opportunity for 
all men under the law, and hostile to special privileges to any, and 
especially privileges to some at the expense of the rest. As the two 
great simple elements of our domestic national politics were slowly 
formulating themselves under the administration of Washington — 
the two simple elements which have dominated our national politics 
ever since, and served as the one stable foundation of our two politi- 
cal parties — our tribe in New England sided with Jefferson in his 
pronounced views of state rights in opposition to centralization, and 
of equality in opposition to privilege. Jefferson's religious views, 
as they were represented in New England, were enormously unpop- 
ular among all classes ; but the instinct, if not the intelligence, of 
the Scotch-Irish, led them to general approval of his political propo- 
sitions ; and as time went on and the results were brought into relief, 
they ranged themselves generally under the Democratic banners, 
particularly in New . Hampshire and that part of Massachusetts 
which is noAV Maine. 

Hamilton's opposite construction of equality of rights, and of 
national powers as over against the states, found greatly more favor 
among the Puritan m-erchants of the bay, and among the Congrega- 
tional clergy generally,- than among the farmers and citizens of 
Presbyterian antecedents. The father of the late " Long Jim " 
Wilson, of Peterborough, N. H., was a Federalist, and his more distin- 
guished son was a Whig, which means the same thing ; and if Ms 
son, the brave General Wilson of our late civil war be a Eepublican, 
as I infer from heredity only, that means the same thing too. The 
Wilson family in successive generations has been distinguished on 
many grounds and in many members, but the mere fact, that the 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 53 

Federalism of the ancestor is noted in Scotch-Irish records, empha- 
sizes the other fact, that the greater part of his compeers took the 
other view. When I was a boy in New Hampshire, I used to hear 
** Long Jim " harangue Whig audiences on the efficacy of Whig doc- 
trines with apparently tremendous effect; but when the election 
day came round, even in the universal fervor of 1840, the rank and 
file of Democratic yeomen rallied unbroken majorities against privi- 
lege and centralization. The " Granite State " is not more granite 
in its rocks than it has been, and will be, in its opposition to all 
schemes of whatever color, designed to rob the masses of men for 
the special benefit of a privileged few, and those designed also to 
make top-heavy and unwieldy the central structure of our compli- 
cated government, at the expense of the older and safer and more 
responsive, because more local, seats of political power. 

Samuel Taggart also, born in Londonderry in 1754, minister in 
Colerain, Mass., for forty-one years, 1777-1818, a graduate of Dart- 
mouth College in 1774, a man of gigantic stature, a member of 
Congress from a district of Western Massachusetts for seven succes- 
sive terms, 1803-17, was nominally a Federalist, yet in reality and 
at bottom, like most of the rank and file of his people in Massachu- 
setts, no friend of privilege and centralization. Indeed, he was a 
typical Scotch-Irishman. He was a politician and a preacher at the 
same time and among the same people. No incongruity suggested 
itself as between these functions to him or to them. They steadily 
supported him in both relations, and he faithfully represented them 
in both. " Where did you leave those few sheep in the Avilderness ? " 
inquired sarcastically John Randolph of Roanoke, of Taggart on 
the floor of the House. He had not left them. He thoroughly 
studied his colleagues at Washington in both branches ; read his 
Bible through every winter he was there ; possessed the confidence 
of Jefferson and Madison, fellow Scotch-Irish from Virginia, during 
both the entire presidential terms of both, though he did not go to 
Washington quite early enough to welcome there, and probably 
would not have heartily welcomed there, Eev. John Leland, his 
Baptist brother, when he took on the mammoth cheese as a testimo- 
nial to Jefferson of the political confidence of the people of Cheshire, 
in my own county of Berkshire. Taggart wrote and published, on 
the "Evidences of Christianity," on "British Impressments from 
our Marine," on the " Final Perseverance of the Saints," and many 
sermons and orations and addresses. 

Political instinct in distinction from political intelligence in the 
masses of our countrymen, and particularly in the masses of our 



64 SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 

immigrants, as leading them to unite with one or other of the two 
great parties, each hokiing with remarkable continuity on the whole 
the tradition of its origin and the lines of its demarcation, has not 
yet received the attention and the respect from our public men 
which are its due. Men are not machines. There is a reason in 
their movements as well in their aggregate as in their individual 
capacity. And when the curse of money is removed from its cor- 
rupting place at or near our ballot boxes, as it will be, it will then 
be seen, that men native and naturalized choose their party from 
impulses and impressions only partly explicable even to themselves ; 
and that there are drifts and currents God-impelled, as well as those 
distinctly started in the human reason, all which are sweeping on 

toward 

" That fair future day, 
Which fate shall brightly gild." 

In conclusion, let me mention just a few living Scotch-Irish 
people out of the New England stock, with whom I chance to be 
acquainted directly or indirectly, whose acquaintance I highly prize, 
and who are each and all distinguished in their sphere : Hugh Mc- 
Culloch, born and bred in Maine, known and honored of all men ; 
Charles J. McCurdy, a nonagenarian jurist of Lyme, Conn. ; Manton 
Marble, of New York ; George W. Anderson, of Boston ; Rev. Dr. 
George Mooar, of Oakland, Cal. ; Miss Philena McKeen, Andover, 
Mass. ; Mrs. Gov. Fairbanks, St. Johnsbury, Vt. ; Eobert C. Mack, 
Londonderry, N. H. ; Senator Blair, and Congressman Moore, and 
Acting Governor Taggart, all of New Hampshire ; Professor L. W. 
Spring, of Williams College ; Major H. B. McClellan, of Kentucky, 
and Henry H. Anderson, of New York. 



SCOTCH-IRISH IN NEW ENGLAND. 55 



PARTIAL LIST OF AUTHOEITIES. 



1. Lincoln's History of Worcester. 

2. Wall's Eeminiscences of Worcester, ■ . > 

3. Worcester Records of Births and Deaths. 

4. Registry of Deeds, Worcester. 

5. Published Inscriptions on Gravestones in Worcester. 

6. Parker's Londonderry, N. H. 

7. State Papers of New Hampshire, particularly "Towns," vol. 14, and 
"Muster-Rolls," vol. 2. 

8. Communications from Robert C. Mack, Londonderry, N. H. 

9. Holland's History of Western Massachusetts, "Colerain," "Bland- 
ford," "Pelham," and passim. 

10. History of Peterborough, N. H. 

11. McKeen's History of Bradford, Vt. 

12. Thompson's Gazetteer of Vermont, "Londonderry," " Landgrove," etc. 

13. Caleb Stark's Life of John Stark. 

14. American Biography, sub verbis, "Matthew Thornton," "Asa Gray," 
"Charles J. McCurdy," etc., etc., etc. 

15. Hugh McCulloch's " Memorials of Half a Century." 

16. Green's " Short History of England," as revised by Mrs. Green. 



